This is not the kind of crap you want to find buried in the backlog of your aggregator.

You may have heard about the legal battle going between 800 pound gorillas Viacom and Google.

The former is suing the later for a billion or so dollars over excerpts from their programs (Daily Show, Colbert, etc) that were posted on YouTube.

The judge in the case has ordered Google to turn over “all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website”.

Translation: Viacom will be getting a list of all the IP addresses that requested one of their videos and when it was viewed, information that could be combined with other data to identify specific individuals.

According to the EFF, this disclosure would violate the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) which makes reference to “prerecorded video cassette tapes or similar audio visual materials.”

The judge ruled that VPPA doesn’t apply in this case since Google wasn’t trading in video tapes. Huh?

I won’t pretend to understand all the legal aspects of this decision. However, I do grasp two major points.

First, that the EFF is probably right when they claim this would be a major “set-back to privacy rights” online if allowed to stand.

And second, that this judge is even more clueless than the people running Viacom.