In March 2007, Viacom filed a suit in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York alleging that Google and YouTube “promote and profit from massive copyright infringement of television programs and feature films on an unprecedented scale involving hundreds of thousands of pirated clips”.

Google claims that it is protected against the allegations by the safe harbour provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
As part of the discovery process in the case, Viacom and The Football Association Premier League Limited, which has also filed suit against the companies, moved jointly to compel Google and YouTube to produce various electronically stored information and documents.

These included: the computer source code that controls the sites’ search functions, as well as source code related to the sites’ recently implemented Video ID programme; copies of all videos that have been removed from the sites for any reason; the logging database information which reveals how often and by whom each video was viewed; user-generated data related to the videos; the schemas, or electronic indexes, for Google’s advertising and video content databases; and copies of all private videos not available for public viewing.

Judge Louis Stanton denied five of the motions and granted three. Those denied included the plaintiffs’ request for the search function source code, which the judge deemed a “vital asset”. He said that its disclosure could “cause catastrophic competitive harm to Google”.

Viacom and The Premier League had argued that the code would help to prove that the defendants “have purposefully designed or modified the tool to facilitate the location of infringing content”.