There has been another development in Viacom's battle against Google's YouTube video sharing website. Manhattan district judge Louis L. Stanton ordered Google to hand over the YouTube access logs, which are to show the actual extent of copyright infringement going on on the popular site.

While this appears a victory for the media creator, it is actually minimized to almost nothing by the other developments in the case. Viacom was defeated on two other counts: Viacom's request for the algorithm to YouTube's Video Identification was turned down, as well as the request for Google to hand over its key search source code, both deemed trade secrets.

Furthermore, the access data that Google needs to make available 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, several media sources reported.

The access logs will be analyzed by outside counsel and experts, CNET reports, quoting Viacom insiders. Also, Google will fight this to the bitter end, all the way to the Supreme Court, the company previously announced.

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.

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."