Viacom Intern. Inc. v. YouTube Inc., Nos. 07 Civ. 2103(LLS), 07 Civ. 3582(LLS), 2008 WL 2627388 (S.D.N.Y. July 2, 2008), is a lawsuit brought by Plaintiff Viacom for alleged copyright infringement by Defendant YouTube. In responding to Plaintiff Viacom's motion to compel production of information from a database storing information about the viewing habits of users of Defendant YouTube's website, the district court judge concluded that Viacom should be provided with all data from the YouTube's Logging database that stores each time a video has been viewed, what time, and by which user.
YouTube allows individuals to upload videos to the YouTube website, where YouTube makes them available for viewing by members of the public free of charge. YouTube then stores information about users' viewing habits in a Logging database, which contains for each instance a video is watched the "login ID" of the user who watched it, the time when the user started to watch the video, the user's internet protocol address, and the identifier for the video. The Logging database provides the only existing record of how often each video has been viewed. In support of its claim that YouTube violated the copyright of videos that have been posted on the YouTube website without authorization for public viewing, Viacom sought production of the data from YouTube's Logging database to compare the attractiveness of allegedly infringing videos with that of non-infringing videos.
YouTube argued that Viacom's request was "unduly burdensome" because producing the large volume of information contained in the Logging database would be "expensive and time-consuming." Nevertheless, the district court judge determined that while the Logging database is large, its contents can be copied onto a few hard drives. Given that ability to produce the information, the district court judge reasoned that Viacom's need for the data outweighed the "unqualified and unsubstantiated" cost of producing the information from the Logging database. YouTube also argued that the data should not be disclosed because of concerns about the privacy rights of users of the YouTube website, suggesting that the information obtained from the Logging database could be used to determine the viewing and video uploading habits of individual users. However, the district court stated that YouTube failed to cite authority barring such discovery and that the privacy concerns were "speculative" because in most cases an internet protocol address cannot alone be used to identify specific individuals. Therefore, the court granted the motion to compel production of all data from YouTube's Logging database concerning each time a video has been viewed on the YouTube website.