The $1 billion lawsuit against Google turned Viacom from the justice-seeker into the “bad guy” of this entire story, after a judge ruled in the favor of accessing YouTube user logs in order to prove their case of copyright infringement.

The YouTube community revolted against the invasion of privacy regarding the judge's ruling first by launching a petition, asking the judge to reconsider his decision, and later by launching a website, boycottviacom.blogspot.com, as a protest against “Viacom stealing all YouTube user histories.”

Viacom defended itself in a statement, saying they only resorted to the lawsuit in order to protect Viacom's rights, as well as the rights of the artists they're collaborating with. Furthermore, they said, they will not seek to obtain any personally identifiable information of any YouTube user, nor will they use the information they obtain for anything else than for proving their case against Google.

In the same statement, Viacom didn't forget to mention that YouTube and Google are responsible for the situation in the first place “by continuing to defend their illegal and irresponsible conduct and profiting from copyright infringement.”

Google responded to the judge's ruling by asking Viacom for the anonymization of user logs before handling them over, in compliance with the court order.

Viacom replied they are committed to a process that complies with the court order and at the same time meets their strongest possible Internet privacy protections. The company also denied allegations of refusing Google's proposal to talk.

According to a New York Times interview, Viacom said it is currently working on techniques, including anonymization, that will enhance the security of the information that is being produced, adding that they will not have direct access to the data.

In March 2007, Viacom filed a lawsuit at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against YouTube, and consequently its owner, Google, for “massive intentional” copyright infringement of Viacom’s entertainment properties.

The lawsuit was re-filed in a modified form this year. According to Viacom, Google should get more involved in finding ways to stop users from uploading copyrighted materials, seeing that at this point YouTube and Google are supporting copyright infringement.