The ruling which demands Google to hand over the YouTube access logs, which are to show the actual extent of copyright infringement going on the popular site, has sparked widespread outrage from Internet users and privacy groups, which are now questioning both the court order and Google's practice of retaining such sensitive data for a long time or permanently, as well as Viacom's overzealous approach to proving its case.

The access data that Google needs to make available to Viacom will be allegedly kept under wraps, and not even Viacom will be able to go through it directly. YouTube's logs are protected by a special provision which triggers contempt of court charges if the data is used for anything else other than proving the prevalence of piracy on YouTube. The access logs will be analyzed by outside counsel and experts.

Meanwhile, the incompetent judge who issued the ruling said that IP address without additional information cannot identify specific individuals, which is very false. Of course, the judge was using some of Google's own language against the company, as it is revealed in the 25-page ruling published online on several sites.

Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Kurt Opsahl demonstrates in a straightforward post on the group's website that the order erroneously ignores the protections of the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), dismissing without any basis Google's correct interpretation that “the data should not be disclosed because of the users’ privacy concerns,” citing the VPPA, 18 U.S.C. § 2710.

VPPA specifically protects “personally identifiable information,” which is defined to include “information which identifies a person as having requested or obtained specific video materials or services,” which is quite clearly also the case with Google's video sharing website YouTube.

The only hope that some privacy is preserved is that Viacom reaches a deal with Google to anonymize the 12 terabytes of logs in order to remove information which may identify YouTube users, while at the same time keeping the information that Viacom needs to prove the alleged widespread infringement of copyright laws on the website.

Also, YouTube has been flooded with anti-Viacom clips which have received hundreds of thousands of hits, some or most of them calling for an all-out boycott of the privacy bully.

Viacom's lawsuit was initially filed last year, but was re-filed in a modified form last month. According to Viacom, Google should get more involved in finding ways to stop users from uploading copyrighted materials, seeing that at this point YouTube’s only measure for this problem enables owners to complain about a certain post and block it from being viewed.