Worried that your obsessive kitten-video viewing records on YouTube would be exposed in Viacom's copyright lawsuit against YouTube? You can relax. Google and Viacom lawyers have reached an agreement to anonymize records of usernames and IP addresses in YouTube's video-viewing logs, which Viacom wants to examine to show patterns of willful copyright infringement on the site. The accounts of employees of both companies, however, aren't included in the deal. And that suggests a negotiating tactic for Google.

Viacom's legal spat with Google has the media conglomerate cast in copyright-hating, freedom-to-upload-videos-loving Silicon Valley as a mustachio-twirling villain, out to expose YouTube viewers' usernames and IP addresses. Bwahahaha! Benighted flack Jeremy Zweig has been reduced to leaving comments on blogs in response. At last, he's getting some corporate firepower: Zweig and Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman Sr. are inviting a bunch of tech journalists a screening next Monday of Tropic Thunder, the Ben Stiller action-movie parody coming to theaters next month, and YouTube probably sooner than that. We've seen the invite list, and it left us scratching our heads.

As a part of its copyright-infringement lawsuit against Google and YouTube, Viacom lawyers have asked for data that will detail which videos YouTube employees have watched and uploaded. Google has so far refused to provide the information, delaying an already agreed-upon transfer of some 12 terabytes of data detailing what types of videos are most often viewed on the site. Here's why Viacom wants the employee information:

Despite reports to the contrary, Viacom did not, as a part of its copyright suit against Google and YouTube, ask for "any personally identifiable information of any YouTube user" the company now wants us all to believe. It will get data from YouTube, but anything personally identifiying will be "stripped from the data." It's nice bit of PR revisionism. According to court documents, Viacom did "seek all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed." Only after the court sided with Viacom, but public opinion did not, did Viacom agree to accept scrubbed data. (Photo by AP)

Record label EMI may have tired of suing individual file sharers for copyright infringement. But a number of music-industry plaintiffs, all partners and subsidiaries of EMI, are suing social network Hi5 and advertising startup VideoEgg in New York Southern District Court for copyright infringement. According to the complaint [PDF]:

Two rulings came down in Viacom's copyright infringement suit against Google and its video-sharing site YouTube yesterday. The first: Despite Viacom's wishes, Google will not have to turn over YouTube's source code. It will however, turn over to Viacom "every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses," reports Threat Level. Viacom's lawyers say they need to the information to prove that copyright-infringing content is more popular on the site than legally uploaded videos. We're hoping Viacom will go on to publish the list, just like AOL did with users' search queries back in 2006. Remember how much fun that was?

Tired of fielding lawsuits from patent trolls and scared of court injunctions like that faced by RIM which nearly shut down the company's BlackBerry service, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Verizon and Ericsson are among the companies rumored to be behind the formation of the Allied Security Trust. Ponying up $250,000 down payments and $5 million in escrow to make purchases, the trust seeks to buy patents before they fall into the hands of patent trolls. (That's the polite name the group's founders use for companies which seek to make money litigating infringers rather than by create products.) But the real bogeyman here is the rise of a possible patent troll to rule all patent trolls, Intellectual Ventures, which has close ties to Microsoft.

U2 frontman Bono disagreed with manager Paul McGuinness's judgment on the failure of Radiohead's Web busking for In Rainbows, but like McGuinness, he lays the blame for the death of the music industry's business model at the feet of those greedy Internet service providers in his open letter to New Music Express:

Luxury goods manufacturers have been increasingly protective of brands, and Parisian courts have sided with homegrown companies against eBay twice now with a ruling against the online auction site in the amount of €40 million ($63 million) for its role in facilitating the trade in knockoff Louis Vuitton handbags, luggage and other accessories. Christian Dior, another brand owned by Vuitton parent LVMH, had earlier won a small judgment against eBay in French courts for the unauthorized sale of Dior perfumes — the perfumes were real, but were in breach of exclusivity agreements Dior had signed with other retailers.

RealNetworks freeing its Rhapsody music store offerings from copy-protection chains is about "going after a larger audience and making a better customer service experience available to people," according to Real VP Neil Smith. It may be too little, too late — I doubt my mom will be shopping at Rhapsody again any time soon, and good luck convincing anyone younger than me to pay for MP3s. [Wired]

Steven Spielberg and David Geffen are offering Indian conglomerate Reliance ADA a large stake in their production company Dreamworks in exchange for $600 million. What none of the press has mentioned? That Reliance was accused by Universal of selling pirated DVDs. Universal, though, is a rival of Dreamworks parent company Paramount, which in turn is a division of Viacom — who are busy suing Google for $1 billion in copyright infringement damages. Your move, MPAA. [Current] (Photo by AP/Kevork Djansezian)

Saul Hansell quoted Digg CEO Jay Adelson defending the Associated Press (of which Hansell's publication the Times is a member). TechCrunch's Michael Arrington freaked out, natch. Adelson then attempted to further explain his complicated position, trying to be diplomatic. Yawn. As we've said before, and will say again, exercise your fair use rights under the law and shut up, because giving the AP attention just feeds its argument and therefore reinforces its position. Moving on:

A couple of bloggers have gotten their panties in a bunch because the Associated Press, a coop that offers original reporting to its 1,500 member newspapers and syndicates to other outlets, is asking that they go a little easier on the copy-paste. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is having none of it!

When CEO Steve Jobs presented the list of countries where the iPhone will be available in the next few months near the close of Tuesday's keynote address at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, the presentation cued music of "It's a Small World After All" — a song long copyrighted by Disney, on which Jobs sits on the board. However, someone at Disney legal must have asked Apple to excise the music from the copy of the video that's archived online. With the original grabbed from Mahalo Daily's one minute version of the address, we've cut together the two versions for comparison. That saddest part? Now you can't hear the jolly chortle of Apple board member Al Gore!

YouTube was a breeze. Though they insist you should "not upload any TV shows, music videos, music concerts, or commercials without permission unless they consist entirely of content you created yourself," they also explain the "fair use" exception to this rule, in detail. They do, however, leave budding filmmakers with this warning, "if the copyright owner disagrees with your interpretation of fair use, the copyright owner may choose to resolve the dispute in court". YouTube knows a thing or two about being dragged into court. But being a sport, they allowed my upload to go live.

While the focus of his ire was Internet service providers, U2 manager Paul McGuinness (pictured here at a U.K. copyright term extension fête with frontman Bono) also blasted "device manufacturers" for the "spectacular devaluation of music." Like, you know, when Apple hired U2 for a commercial and packaged a bunch of low-bitrate, DRM-laden MP3s of U2's back catalog for $149 at the iTunes store. [Variety]

Google won't serve ads on top of some YouTube videos for fear of copyright infringement. Google's advertising partner Mogulus, a live-streaming video site, shares no such concerns. Mogulus overlays Google ads on every live streaming and recorded video uploaded to its site. The partial screenshot above shows a Mogulus user live-streaming an NBA playoff game with Google ads run along the bottom of the frame. (The NBA, like other sports leagues, strictly licenses broadcasts of its games.) Google may not be aware it's making money selling ads against copyrighted content. A tipster tells us Google agreed to to serve ads only against Mogulus's recorded content, not live videos such as the Lakers game above. A full screenshot:

Everyone's favorite former Minnesota state high school basketball champion Prince is demanding fans take down his cover of Radiohead's "Creep" from YouTube. In the byzantine maze of music rights, Thom Yorke has the publishing rights to the song, whereas Prince only had live performance rights, probably under a blanket deal with Coachella and the major song publishers — not necessarily recording or much less video distribution rights from the performance. When asked about the fracas, Yorke replied "Well, tell him to unblock it. It's our ... song." [LA Times]

Michael Jordan, former CEO of CBS, has been tapped by Redlasso as an advisor, presumably to glad-hand the TV companies which sent the company a cease and desist letter last week. The startup has cobbled together a fair-use defense; the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Valleywag they're watching the case but declined to weigh in. But if Redlasso were going to fight the networks in court, it would have hired lawyers, not a dealmaker like Jordan. The company has been in talks with the networks for years. So what went wrong? Hulu.

Jim Louderback, the CEO of Revision3, is jumpin' mad. A denial-of-service attack brought down the online-video network over the weekend, and it wasn't the work of a freelance hacker with a distributed network of compromised machines, he writes in the company blog. It was, he says, the deliberate act of MediaDefender, an antipiracy consulting group which works to shut down file-sharing networks. Revision3 uses BitTorrent, a file-sharing protocol, to distribute its own content, and runs a "tracker" server to coordinate those downloads. All of this is quite legal. MediaDefender, it turns out, found a security hole in Revision3's server, and planted unknown files, possibly illegal copies on Revision3's servers, for their own purposes. It's not clear why, but whatever the motive, MediaDefender may have broken several laws in doing so.