When you first read about the Google-Viacom lawsuit, you never thought that it would affect you directly, did you? Think again.

Judge Louis L. Stanton, presiding over the federal court for the Southern District of New York, has ordered Google to give Viacom the IP addresses and other data about the users who watched YouTube videos, either on YouTube itself or embedded on a third party website. If you want to get depressed further, read the entire document here.

Let me tell you, in the shortest possible terms, what this means. It means you. Unless you've been extra careful to only watch non-copyrighted videos on YouTube (yeah, right), Viacom could sue you. No, it's even worse: they could actually win.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an analysis which shows that this decision is in violation of the VPPA (Video Privacy Protection Act). However, and interestingly enough, the court denied Viacom's request of YouTube's source code, which means that the big company - Google - got protected, but the little guy - us - got screwed.

The court justified its decisions partly by what the folks at Google had written in a blog post a while ago. An IP address is not personal data; it cannot identify you without any additional information, they argued. Google has stabbed itself in the foot with that post, but even without going into its analysis, I can tell you the following:

a) Viacom wants these IP addresses precisely because they want to be able to identify the users. Why else would they ask for them? b) Yes, the IP address is only one piece of the puzzle. YouTube login info - which Google also must produce to Viacom - is another. I bet those two are enough for full identification of many users. But even if they're not, asking for this data and saying "they're not enough to identify the user" is completely stupid, because little by little Viacom will get the rest of the data they need - from the ISPs, for example. It's like saying: hey, you: I'm not going to ask you for your personal data, only your first name and the city you live in, please.

I think I'm not alone here when I say screw you, Viacom. Take your lousy videos and watch them yourselves. Slap a nice watermark on each one so I can make sure I never watch one again. In the meantime, can someone make sure that judges who probably don't have a clue about what an IP address is don't get assigned to cases like this? Thank you.