The Viacom vs. Google legal battle is far from being settled, but the two parts did manage to reach an agreement to anonymize the data that Google must hand over to Viacom under the judge's ruling. The announcement was made late Monday, when both companies revealed an agreement to protect user privacy by not using user viewing history to prove a case.

The $1 billion lawsuit against Google's YouTube brought Viacom a lot more negative publicity than they would have thought. A judge's decision to grant Viacom access to YouTube user logs in order to support their copyright infringement accusations tuned not only YouTube users, but also the media against them.

The judge's decision forced Google to hand over usernames, IP addresses and video history of YouTube users, but it also drew a lot of privacy issues – that however didn't seem to worry the judge that much, as he dismissed them as speculations.

The YouTube community responded with a petition for the judge to reconsider his decision, and with a website to protest against Viacom for trying to steal user histories.

However, Viacom denied breaking any privacy rules, and said they will only use data that doesn't contain any identifiable information to prove their case against Google. But that didn't settle the matter. Now the two parties finally reached an agreement that allows Google to anonymize user data, making it hard to identify individual users.

“We are pleased to report that Viacom, MTV and other litigants have backed off their original demand for all users' viewing histories and we will not be providing that information,” Google said in a blog.

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.