Google and Viacom reached an agreement of the handing over of the YouTube logs. The two companies will jointly develop a way of anonymizing them, which consists of replacing usernames and IP numbers with unique identifiers. This is not exactly what YouTube's staff announced by alleging that:

We are pleased to report that Viacom, MTV and other litigants have backed off their original demand for all users' viewing histories and we will not be providing that information.

In fact, Google will provide users' viewing histories, only that the real user names will be changed to coded strings. Viacom allegedly agreed not to circumvent any encryption techniques YouTube might put in place to protect user identities.

The problem is that two years ago, The New York Times correctly identified such an "anonymized" user, AOL customer Thelma Arnold, 62. This means that the agreement still amounts to an appalling violation of privacy.

The incompetent judge who issued the ruling said that IP address without additional information cannot identify specific individuals, which is very false. Most IP addresses can be easily traced back to a certain person, through their ISP, which has logs indicating precisely which computer and account used a certain IP at a specific moment in time.

Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Kurt Opsahl demonstrated in a straightforward post on the group's website that the order erroneously ignores the protections of the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), dismissing without any basis Google's correct interpretation that “the data should not be disclosed because of the users’ privacy concerns,” citing the VPPA, 18 U.S.C. § 2710.

VPPA specifically protects “personally identifiable information,” which is defined to include “information which identifies a person as having requested or obtained specific video materials or services,” which is quite clearly also the case with Google's video sharing website YouTube.

Viacom's lawsuit was initially filed last year, but was re-filed in a modified form last month. According to Viacom, Google should get more involved in finding ways to stop users from uploading copyrighted materials, seeing that at this point YouTube’s only measure for this problem enables owners to complain about a certain post and block it from being viewed.