Reuters and the New York Times report that Viacom and Google/YouTube have agreed to anonymize user information as part of discovery in the lawsuit between them over copyright infringement in user generated or uploaded content.
Earlier in July, a federal judge in Manhattan ordered Google to turn over YouTube user data to Viacom and other plaintiffs to help them to prepare a confidential study of what they argue are vast piracy violations on the video-sharing site.
Google said it had now agreed to provide lawyers for Viacom and a class-action group led by the Football Association of England, a large viewership database that blanks out YouTube username and Internet address data that could be used to identify individual video watchers.
