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.