A new development has taken place in Viacom's year-long case against video-sharing site YouTube, now part of the Google empire. The two companies are in the discovery part of the $1-billion lawsuit and must make certain information available to each other, as a part of which a federal judge has asked the search giant to make user histories available to the media conglomerate. (See: Viacom sues YouTube, seeks $1 billion damages for copyright violations)

On Wednesday, 2 June, US District Judge Louis L Stanton ordered Google to turn over millions of videos it has removed from the video-sharing site, user login IDs, records showing when users watched videos, their IP addresses, and numbers that identify the videos. The order applies not only to videos watched on YouTube but also to videos embedded on third-party Web sites.

Google tried to argue that the request, for about 12 TB of data, was unduly burdensome, but Judge Stanton determined that it would be easy to copy. The search engine company also argued that Viacom's request for the information threatened user privacy because it would disclose viewing and video uploading patterns and link them with login IDs and IP addresses.

Stanton characterised those concerns as "speculative" and said Google failed to provide legal justification for that argument. However, he expressly warned Viacom not to use the data for anything other than proving the prevalence of infringement on YouTube.

Viacom, therefore, is forbidden from targeting individual users in the manner of the Recording Industry Association of America's lawsuits against individuals found to be downloading illegal music.

Stanton did decide in Google's favour by turning down requests for proprietary information such as indexes showing how Google organises its videos and ads, as well as the source code for YouTube search, Google search, and the company's new video ID programme.

The judge also ruled in Google's favour on two other points. He denied Viacom's request for titles, keywords, comments, and flags for inappropriate content, saying that request was too broad. He also declared that private videos uploaded by a user sharing with one other user are protected under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

Viacom sought the records to prove its claim that YouTube and Google encourage or promote copyright infringement by its users. The case is being heard in federal court in Manhattan.

Privacy advocates said that YouTube users' privacy rights would be violated if the information is released.

Google responded yesterday in a statement to the court's order.

"We are pleased the court put some limits on discovery," Google said in the statement, "including refusing to allow Viacom to access users' private videos and our search technology. We are disappointed the court granted Viacom's overreaching demand for viewing history. We are asking Viacom to respect users' privacy and allow us to anonymize the logs before producing them under the court's order."