Commentary

Possible Leaker Of Confidential Docs Settles With YouTube

Almost one year before Viacom filed its high-profile, yet so-far unsuccessful lawsuit agianst YouTube, journalist Robert Tur brought a nearly identical copyright infringement case against the video-sharing site.

Tur, like Viacom, The Football Association Premier League and other content owners, lost the case in May, when U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton in New York ruled that Google was protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That law provides that Web sites are immune from liability for infringing clips uploaded by users, provided the sites remove the clips on request.

Viacom is appealing, but Tur this week agreed that he would not. Tur also promised to pay $20,000 to YouTube.

Why did Tur do so? The court papers don't say, but observers speculate that Tur must have agreed to the terms because he leaked confidential documents to Cnet last year.

Last October, Cnet published the article "Did Viacom find smoking gun in YouTube case?," reporting that YouTube executives had sent emails indicating that they knew about piracy on the site and decided not to remove the content. The article said three sources had come forward with information about those emails.

At the time, those emails -- like many other bits of information in the case - were subject to a court order of confidentiality. Unhappy about the breach, Google lawyers began hunting down the leaker -- at one point going so far as to threaten to subpoena the Cnet reporter who wrote the story. Ultimately, other evidence pointed toward Tur, and a showdown about whether reporters can protect their sources was averted.

Of course, court orders shouldn't be ignored. But why this material was ever subject to such an order in the first place remains unclear. And, when you consider that Google has amassed its fortune by making information accessible, the company's efforts to take action against a leaker in this case is rife with irony, if nothing else.

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