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Viacom Sues Google, YouTube for $1B

Posted on: Tuesday, 13 March 2007, 12:00 CDT

U.S. media company Viacom Inc. filed a $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit against Google Inc. and its YouTube business Tuesday.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, claims the video-sharing site engages in massive intentional copyright infringement, a Viacom statement said.

Viacom also seeks an injunction preventing Google and YouTube from further copyright infringement.

Viacom -- parent of MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central -- claims YouTube made nearly 160,000 unauthorized Viacom programming clips available on its video-sharing Web site, which have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

It also said settlement talks with Google and YouTube were unproductive. In February, Viacom ordered YouTube to remove all its content from the site.

YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others' creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google, Viacom said.

Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws, Viacom's statement continued.

Source: United Press International

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