You think Viacom's nuts suing Google for $1 billion over "massive" copyright infringement on YouTube? Well, heads up, pal. You might owe somebody $12.45 million for your own copyright crimes. That is, if your days are anything like the "ordinary day in the life of a hypothetical law professor named John" that law professor John Tehranian's describes in his new paper (PDF) in the Utah Law Review.

In the paper, titled "Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap," Tehranian chronicles a day in the life of the good if hypothetical professor, who through emails and poetry readings manages to tally up 83 acts of copyright infringement, which, if repeated over the course of year, would lead to liabilities of $4.544 billion.

It's an absurd number. And that's Tehranian's point. He writes, "One must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer — a veritable grand larcenist — or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say."