Viacom, Google air dirty laundry in court docs

Court filings released on Thursday in the bitter $1 billion copyright fight between Viacom and Google's YouTube show just how far apart the companies remain, as the 3-year-old case winds through federal court.
Viacom, in 108 pages of court documents, portrays YouTube's founders as reckless copyright violators who were far more concerned with increasing traffic to their site than obeying the law. Even executives at Google, which acquired YouTube for $1.7 billion in October 2006, questioned the ethics of building a site through questionable copyright practices, according to the Viacom filings.

But in the 100-page document filed by Google, perhaps not surprisingly, the search engine tells a different story. Viacom is painted as a media giant trying to play it both ways: demanding that YouTube take down videos even while third parties were uploading Viacom content on the entertainment giant's behalf. More intriguingly, the parent company of MTV and Paramount Pictures was at one point interested in acquiring the video-sharing site, according to the documents.
"We believe YouTube would make a transformative acquisition for MTV Networks/Viacom that would immediately make us the leading deliverer of video online, globally," according to an internal Viacom slide that Google filed with the court.
Interesting as the documents may be, it's not clear which side will benefit most from the disclosures. Google argues that it is protected by the safe-harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which says, in short, that if a Web site acts in good faith to take down copyrighted content as soon as it learns of it, and it has not benefited financially through advertising or other means, it is protected from a lawsuit. Viacom is attempting to pierce that protection by proving that YouTube employees, at the very least, knew of rampant copyright violations on their site and did little about it.
:news.cnet.com

Viacom to Get YouTube User Histories

Google has been ordered to turn over the viewing history of every YouTube user...to Viacom.This is an example of a formatted note note.

As litigation continues in Viacom's $1 billion copyright infringement suit against Google, a judge has ordered (PDF) Google most turn over the usage histories of every YouTube user to Viacom. The usage logs contain each YouTube user's login ID, the IP address used to connect to YouTube, as well as a video identifier and a start time.

The court did not order the Google disclose to Viacom its search code, schemas, and other intellectual property, noting that such disclosure—even under a non-disclosure agreement—would cause Google harm since the information carries significant commercial value. The court also ruled Viacom doesn't get data on privacy videos hosted on YouTube—that is, videos that can only be seen by a user specifically authorized to view it.

Although Viacom won't get information on private videos, the ordered disclosure of user histories is being decried as a setback for online privacy. "The Court's erroneous ruling is a set-back to privacy rights," wrote the EFF's Kurt Opsahl, "and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube. We urge Viacom to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users."

Viacom is suing Google for copyright infringement, claiming that Google's YouTube service is profiting off the illegal distribution of Viacom content (including clips from popular programs like The Daily Show and South Park). Viacom says it had identified more than 160,000 infringing clips which had been viewed a total of 1.5 billion times as of early 2007. Google maintains it offers copyright holders mechanisms to have infringing content taken down from the service. YouTube has long been promising to roll out content filtering technology that prevents infringing material from being uploaded to YouTube in the first place.