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Viacom, YouTube reach deal on data - July 15, 2008

Lawyers for Viacom and YouTube reached an agreement late Wednesday on redacting personally identifiable information from the user data YouTube was ordered by the court to turn over in the companies' $1 billion copyright infringement litigation. However, the parties agreed to disagree for now on the status of the video viewing records of YouTube employees. According to the stipulation agreement submitted to the court yesterday, the parties "will meet and confer within 14 days of the execution of this Stipulation concerning records reflecting the business activities of the parties’ employees and agents." If an agreement still cannot be reached, either party can submit the question to the court for a decision.

Full text of the stipulation agreement is here.

According to the formal legalese,

[YouTube] shall substitute values while preserving uniqueness for entries in the following fields: User ID, IP Address and Visitor ID. The parties shall agree as promptly as feasible on a specific protocol to govern this substitution whereby each unique value contained in these fields shall be assigned a correlative unique substituted value, and preexisting interdependencies shall be retained in the version of the data produced.

YouTube has seven business days in which to propose a protocol for the substitution.

Best part is paragraph 2 of the agreement, in which the parties agree that, "they shall not engage in any efforts to circumvent the encryption utilized pursuant to Paragraph 1 this Stipulation."

It wouldn't do to have a copyright owner circumventing encryption.


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