A U.S. federal judge in New York this week ordered YouTube to release data on the viewing habits of its tens of millions of worldwide viewers to Viacom, the media company that owns large cable networks such as MTV, VH1 and Nickelodeon.

'On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton granted Viacom's request that YouTube release its 12-terabyte 'logging' database -- a database that is larger than the Library of Congress's collection of about 10 million books, to Viacom. Every minute, 13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube servers. The site logs hundreds of millions of views a week.

The database contains the unique login ID of the viewer, the time he began watching, the Internet Protocol, or IP, address of the user's computer and the identification of the video. That database is the only existing record of how often each video has been viewed during various time periods, the opinion said. Its data can recreate the number of views of a video for any particular day.

In ordering the data release, Stanton said that YouTube's privacy concerns were 'speculative,' that Google cited 'no authority barring them from disclosing such information in civil discovery proceedings' and that Google itself has noted that an IP address without additional information cannot in most cases identify a person.'

The ruling would seem to disregard the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act's protection against people's video-viewing habits from being disclosed. 'The law says that records may not be turned over unless the consumer is given the opportunity to object.'