Judge Louis Stanton ordered Google to hand over the user log data of its YouTube website to Viacom, in a lawsuit that the entertainment company has filed against the search giant asking $1 billion for infringed intellectual property.

Viacom declared that YouTube hosts a lot of its copyrighted shows, and that users can see them for free, without paying the company anything. Viacom also considered that this costs it a lot of money, and that Google should be held responsible for what happens. The company said that recent episodes of some of its shows such as MTV Unplugged or South Park have been repeatedly viewed by YouTube users.

Google’s defense consisted in saying that while copyrighted content is uploaded on YouTube by certain users, the company takes the content off the site as soon as they find out about it. However, Viacom managed to determine Judge Stanton to force Google into handing over YouTube user log data, a decision much debated by the press.

The main issue here is that user log data is private information that Google has to keep from third parties. Or at least this is what everybody thinks it should be. If Viacom decides to use the information to sue everybody who watched a copyrighted clip on YouTube, a lot of people will have to pay money to the company, even though they might not have been aware of the fact that they were breaking the law. And even if the company said that it won’t use the data for this purpose, but rather to try and determine exactly how many clips of its shows have been viewed and how many times, how can one be sure that Viacom will keep its word?

And there is something more to it. If a judge can make a company hand over private data to other companies so easily, how secure will we feel to use cloud computing, which could represent the future in what internet usage is concerned?