Google ordered to divulge Youtube viewing log

[noel emits]

Viacom Vs. You & Youtube *FIGHT*

Google's senior litigation counsel Catherine Lacavera said in a statement: "We are disappointed the court granted Viacom's over-reaching demand for viewing history.
"We will ask Viacom to respect users' privacy and allow us to anonymise the logs before producing them under the court's order."
The ruling will see the viewing habits of millions of YouTube users given to Viacom, totalling more than 12 terabytes of data.
Viacom said it wanted the data to "compare the attractiveness of allegedly infringing video with that of non-infringing videos."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7488009.stm

Be interesting to see if Viacom will be satisfied with the login details / IP addresses of users being masked. If it's purely statistical data they're after then it shouldn't be an issue.

 

[noel emits]

Well at least Viacom have agreed to accept anonymous data from Google on this.

Viacom has now accepted that the records be made anonymous and Google will now supply them with the IP addresses and user data it has been ordered to provide. Viacom intends to study the data to help prove how its copyright material was made available on the site and how often it was viewed.
http://www.geek.com/viacom-agrees-to-anonymous-youtube-user-data-20080716/

Actually that's a bit unclear isn't it?