YouTube Turning Over Logs

NEW YORK (AP) - Just imagine all the people who check in to see
all the videos on YouTube. Well, dismissing privacy concerns, a
federal judge overseeing a billion dollar copyright-infringement
lawsuit against YouTube has ordered the company to disclose who
watches which video clips and when. The judge authorized full
access to the YouTube logs after Viacom and other copyright holders
argued that they needed the info to show whether their
copyright-protected videos are more heavily watched than amateur
clips. The data isn't supposed to be publicly released but
disclosed only to the plaintiffs, and it will include less specific
identifiers than a user's real name or e-mail address. Lawyers for
Google, which owns YouTube, says producing 12 terabytes of data --
equivalent to the text of roughly 12 million books -- would be
expensive, time-consuming and a threat to users' privacy. The
database includes information on when each video gets played, which
can be used to determine how often a clip is viewed. Attached to
each entry is each viewer's unique login ID and the Internet
Protocol, or IP, address for that viewer's computer.