YouTube users breathe sigh of relief

14:51 16th July 2008

Google and Viacom have reached an agreement to omit user names from a YouTube viewer log, which the search giant has been ordered by a judge to hand over.

As part of an ongoing copyright case against YouTube, Viacom won the right to view the huge log file, but the agreement means that the entertainment company will not be able to see precisely which videos have been accessed by each viewer.

This has allayed fears that the logs would be pursued by Viacom to initiate individual lawsuits against YouTube users who have uploaded or viewed copyrighted content.

Kurt Opsahl, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, emphasised that the case - based around the IT industry's privacy concerns - is not fully settled yet.

He said: "This stipulation between Viacom and Google voluntarily narrowing the scope of the discovery order, while a very useful first step, does not fully resolve these concerns."

Meanwhile, in other IT industry news the search advertising deal between Google and Yahoo has been criticised by Microsoft, who have said that it amounts to a monopoly of the advertising industry.

Computeach can help you gain the skills to enter the IT industry.