Google and its YouTube video-sharing site gained a small victory when Viacom and other parties suing the company for letting users share their video content online agreed to keep users' viewing history private.

Viacom July 4 had asked through a New York district court that YouTube be required to produce viewing data, including usernames and IP addresses, from its database as a way to track who was uploading its copyrighted content and who was viewing it.

This measure was designed to give Viacom and the litany of other plaintiffs, including Viacom's Paramount Pictures, proof that YouTube's millions of users were indeed trouncing copyright laws by airing their content on the Web with abandon.

The litigants have been locked in this battle since Viacom triggered its $1 billion suit in March 2007. Google and YouTube have tried to strip out copyrighted content when they became aware of it, but users still game the system and put the content up there as part of the billions of hours worth of content on the popular site.

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