Massive breach of privacy

A senior US District Court judge, Louis L. Stanton (South District, NY), has ordered Google to hand over approximately 12-terabytes of data to Viacom as part of the long-standing copyright infringement case between the two companies. The data Viacom is interested in contains the log-in name, IP address and a list of videos requested from each and every YouTube user. Google has also been ordered to hand over a list of every YouTube video that was removed from the system for any reason.

Viacom successfully argued it needed this data to study the popularity of copyrighted material vs. non-copyrighted material on Google’s YouTube video search engine. To offer a base comparison, the Library of Congress is thought to contain between 12 and 20-terabytes of information.

(1,024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte /1,024 gigabytes = 1 terabyte /1,048,576 (1,024²) megabytes = 1 terabyte, or, think about a really, really big building, the kind that could hold an Olympic sized swimming pool and about 4,000 spectators. Fill it full, floor to ceiling, with paper. That’s about the size of the data Viacom wants to see. – calculations courtesy of wisegeek.com)

Judge Stanton, who graduated law school in the mid 1950’s, doesn’t seem to realize the privacy implications of giving Viacom access to this information. In the opinion he handed down ordering Google to release the information, Stanton wrote that user privacy concerns expressed by Google are “speculative”.

“… defendants cite no authority barring them from disclosing such information in civil discovery proceedings, and their privacy concerns are speculative.”

Stanton included a quote culled from the Google Public Policy Blog

“… IP addresses recorded by every website on the planet without additional information should not be considered personal data, because these websites usually cannot identify the human beings behind these number strings.”

in his opinion however he apparently did not read or fully understand the comments below the post, each of which disagree with Google’s opinion that IP addresses are not necessarily personally identifying information.

The crux of the issue is that IP addresses ARE personally identifying information. Any argument otherwise is silly. My ISP knows exactly who is using the IP address assigned to my computer at this very moment. They know where I am, what sites I travel to, and what time I started and stopped surfing around the ‘net. My ISP knows me better than friends, family or the fine folks at Revenue Canada do.

99.999999999999999% of the time, this fact does not concern me in any way. Chances are, my ISP doesn’t really care. Besides which, I don’t have very much to hide. I’m a good person. I am not an axe-murderer. I dislike gory movies. I am not doing anything illegal, or at least I don’t think I am. While bands like The Clash, Generation-X, Jello Biafra, The Cramps and They Might Be Giants could be considered slightly subversive, (if not slightly dated), enjoying their music is certainly not against the law.

It ain’t what ya do, it’s the way that you do it…

In the cold hard reality of copyright law, I am a criminal for enjoying nostalgic videos on YouTube. See, I am more than smart enough to understand that the video in front of me is owned by someone or some entity. Joe Strummer and Mick Jones got paid to make those videos. I know that. Though John and John both support the concept of user-shared music, the record company executive who cuts their royalty cheques (assuming They Might Be Giants are still getting paid) does not.

If Viacom gets its hands on that user-data, I might find out that viewing the last half-dozen Red Hot Chilli Peppers videos was a really bad idea. Viacom will have all the evidence it needs to sue me like the RIAA did to individual music file-sharers. Who’d have thought watching YouTube content can be illegal? Who’d have thought breaking the law while working could be so funky? Who’d have thought a US Federal judge could be so intellectually careless?

Google will hopefully find a way to appeal this order. Viacom has other paths it could follow to find the information it says it needs to understand how much of its copyrighted material made its way to YouTube. What Viacom is really looking for is a way to figure out how often its material was viewed and by whom. Once Viacom has a rough figure for the amount of copyrighted content on YouTube, it will be able to attached an enormous dollar figure for the number of downloads each copyrighted file received. Then it will be able to go after Google for facilitating transmission of that material.

It will also be able to come after me. I enjoyed something I shouldn’t have, at least not for free. In the past week, I have watched countless 80’s music videos in my never-ending attempt to relive my youth. It happens with alarming frequency and one guitar-grinding reminiscence is never enough. Beware YouTube users… Viacom might be about to learn a heck of a lot about you personally.