Viacom Slaps Google’s YouTube with $1 Billion Copyright Suit

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Viacom Slaps Google’s YouTube with $1 Billion Copyright Suit

7:18 am on March 14, 2007 | Category: Web Services, Law

Media conglomerate, Viacom Inc., dealt a major blow to Google Inc.’s online video ambitions yesterday, filing a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against the search giant and its video sharing site, YouTube.

The lawsuit, filed at a U.S. District Court in New York, accuses Google of “massive intentional copyright infringement,” on the basis that almost 160,000 Viacom-owned video clips have been uploaded to YouTube, and viewed a total of more than 1.5 billion times.

“YouTube’s strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site,” Viacom explained in a statement. “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.”

The media giant claims that its decision to sue came after “a great deal of unproductive negotiation.”

YouTube’s parent company, Google, responded by expressing confidence that the legal rights of copyright holders had not in fact been violated.

“YouTube is great for users and offers real opportunities to rights holders: the opportunity to interact with users; to promote their content to a young and growing audience; and to tap into the online advertising market,” Google said in a statement. “We will certainly not let this suit become a distraction to the continuing growth and strong performance of YouTube and its ability to attract more users, more traffic and build a stronger community.”