A July 1 ruling gave Viacom access to YouTube’s huge database, a 12 Terabytes collection of user data information, including capabilities to track down the videos that a person viewed. The ruling could be seen as a partial victory in the lawsuit that Viacom filled against YouTube and its parent company, Google, claiming that the two are infringing copyright laws.

Viacom, which owns the Paramount movie studio as well as the MTV and VH1 television networks, demands $1 billion from YouTube, because the site allows people to post Viacom copyrighted videos. Google defends itself citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was enacted in 1998 and which states that web sites should not be held responsible for the content its users upload, if they take down copyrighted or illegal content once they are formally announced of its presence.

Even though it is a known fact that YouTube removes videos immediately if they are announced that the content is protected or does not comply with its policy, Viacom said that the website and its parent company are still taking advantage of the massive traffic these videos are generating even in the supposedly short period that they are online.

The decision raised concerns among user privacy advocacy groups which claim that the ruling comes against the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act, which says that nobody should have access to information that discloses what videos a person rented.

Viacom said that it does not intend to use this information to sue people who post pirated videos or watch them. Instead, the company requested this information just to prove that pirated content brings YouTube more traffic than the home-made one.