NY District Court Orders Google to Provide Viacom with Vital Data of Google's YouTube Users in $1 Billion Infringement Suit

Holding:

In a ruling on a motion to compel production of evidence as part of Plaintiff Viacom, Inc. and Future Association Premier League Limited 's ("Viacom") $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against Defendants YouTube, Inc., YouTube, LLC, and Google, Inc., which owns and operates the video-sharing website known as “YouTube.com” ("Google"), the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York required Google to provide the viewing log of YouTube.com, a website owned by Google. The viewing log will be used by Viacom to demonstrate instances of copyright infringement on YouTube.com. In an effort to stop this disclosure, Defendant argued that the data should not be revealed because of YouTube users’ privacy concerns. The District Court rejected this argument, stating that Defendants did not show precedent barring such disclosure in civil discovery proceedings, and that their users' privacy concerns were merely speculative. Therefore, the District Court granted Plaintiffs’ motion to compel production of 12 terabytes of data containing the unique login ID of each viewer, the time he began watching, the Internet Protocol, or IP, address of the user's computer and the identification of the video.

Detailed Summary:

Viacom owns the copyrights in specified television programs, motion pictures, music recordings, and other entertainment programs.  In the underlying lawsuit, Viacom allege s violations of the Copyright Act of 1976 (17 U.S.C. § 101 et seq.) by Google.  Because YouTube.com users contribute pirated copyrighted works to YouTube.com by the thousands, including those owned by Plaintiffs, the videos delivered   by YouTube.com include a vast unauthorized collection of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted audiovisual works. Opinion, pp. 1-2, citing Viacom’s First Amended Complaint, paragraphs 30-31.  In the underlying lawsuit, Viacom allege s that th e pirated copyrighted work were infringements which YouTube and Google induced…

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