Viacom has agreed to allow search engine giant Google to anonymize the logs of its mega-popular video sharing web site, YouTube. Google needs to hand over the 12 terabytes of logs after Judge Louis L. Stanton of the U.S. District Court in New York ruled on July 1 that Viacom has the right to get the data as it was needed to prove its copyright infringement allegations.

The case was started about one year ago when Viacom filed charges against YouTube, accusing the popular website of having infringed upon numerous of its copyrights. Viacom said that Google does very "little or nothing" for stopping the upload of illegal videos on 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.

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.

Unfortunately, there is apparently no way of preventing YouTube from logging your viewing history forever. It appears that the YouTube page called, "How do I clear my Viewing History" refers to clearing the list of videos that you've watched since your browser window has been open, not the actual server logs.