psyopper writes "Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube,...

Viacom got a partial victory in the $1 billion lawsuit against Google Inc. and its YouTube practices, after a federal judge’s decision forces YouTube to give Viacom a complete log of its users’ activities, including their names and the videos they’ve watched.

The plaintiff plans to use the logs to prove that YouTube is guilty of copyright infringement. For users, this means that Viacom will have access to all the videos they have watched on YouTube, which might open another delicate issue, that of exposing private user information.

The judge dismissed Google’s arguments that the order violates user privacy and their own privacy policy, saying that these concerns are speculative.

Viacom is trying to prove a point by obtaining the logs, and that is to show how the videos infringing copyrights are in fact the most watched by YouTube users, which means the site supports copyright infringement, despite its attempts to filter the copyrighted clips.

Viacom may chant victory over this decision, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation says the decision ignores the protections of the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), which protects “personally identifiable information.”

The court order, EFF said, ordered the production of not just IP addresses, but also associated...
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