• BBC News , Tuesday, July 15, 2008 11:16 AM

Google, which had been ordered by a U.S. court to provide personal details on millions of YouTube users as part of a copyright infringement suit with Viacom, is now being ordered to hand over the database without the user data, the company revealed in a statement yesterday. "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," the statement read.

Viacom is suing Google for $1 billion for copyright infringement. The media giant claims that it identified 160,000 unauthorized clips of its programs on the Google video site, which it claims had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times without its consent. Shortly after Viacom sued in March 2007, YouTube introduced filtering technology to keep unauthorized copyrighted content from appearing on its site.

Viacom had said it wanted the log data to "compare the attractiveness of allegedly infringing video with that of non-infringing videos," but privacy advocates worried this would put YouTube users in a compromising situation that breached a 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act, which was passed after the rental habits of a Supreme Court nominee became public. Per the new ruling, Google will be allowed to hand over the data logs in an anonymized form.

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