Another day, another court case furthers a dangerous precedent when it comes to who’s responsible for misconduct on the Web. Last time it was eBay that was dealt the blow when they were held accountable for it’s users selling items illegally. This time Google takes a hit as a US judge ordered the Web giant to turn over significant amounts of YouTube user data to Viacom to help determine whether or not Google’s YouTube is profitting more off copyrighted materials than user uploaded clips.
The data Google is to hand over includes records of every video watched by YouTube users along with logs that include various user data (such as IP address and viewing histories). Google must also hand over copies of all videos it has ever taken down. Viacom did ask for more, such as YouTube’s source code and copies of all private videos, but the judge threw those requests out.