The ruling which demands Google to hand over the YouTube access logs, which are to show the actual extent of copyright infringement going on the popular site, has sparked outrage from privacy groups, which are now questioning both the court order and Google's practice of retaining such sensitive data for a long time or permanently.

The access data that Google needs to make available to Viacom will be airtight sealed, and not even Viacom will be able to go through it directly. YouTube's logs are protected by a special provision which triggers contempt of court charges if the data is used for anything else other than proving the prevalence of piracy on YouTube. The access logs will be analyzed by outside counsel and experts.

"Viacom has not asked for and will not be obtaining any personally identifiable information of any user," Viacom said, reassuring that the data will be handled by both companies in a highly confidential manner. Google wants to process the access logs and "anonymize" them, removing private information such as usernames and IP addresses.

Simon Davies, director of Privacy International in London, said to Bloomberg that the group will complain to data-protection officials from the 27 European Union nations by July 7. Privacy experts fear not the actual YouTube logs at issue being revealed, but rather the precedent set which extends what courts are willing to do.

In May, YouTube owner Google Inc. said that Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against the company is a threat to Internet communications. Google expressed its concern that such a lawsuit could be considered a direct threat to freedom on the internet. Google’s lawyers are very confident about the defense they managed to build and are ready to take it all the way to the Supreme Court.

The search engine leader has pointed out that it does a lot more than it is legally bound to in order to prevent unauthorized copyrighted videos from being shared on YouTube. The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects companies as long as they take down in a timely manner copyrighted content once they are notified by the copyright owner.

YouTube has implemented video filtering technology which enables immediate detection of most copyrighted clips. Though, as Jeremy Zweig, Vice President, Viacom Media and Editorial, pointed out there is no large scale system implemented yet.

Viacom's lawsuit was initially filed last year, but was refiled 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.

So far, Viacom has records of more than 150,000 unauthorized clips uploaded on the popular web site, among which several shows from MTV, Comedy Central and also other network broadcasts like "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "South Park."