Viacom Sues Google for $1 Billion

[Suhit Gupta]

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=6465

"One of cable's largest media conglomorates has opened the litigation against YouTube. Viacom today announced it has filed a lawsuit against Google in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Viacom filed the lawsuit claiming that Google intentionally committed massive copyright infringement of Viacom’s entertainment properties. The lawsuit seeks more than $1 billion in damages, in addition to an injunction that will prohibit Google/YouTube from further copyright infringement. In its statement, Viacom said that “almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom’s programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.” Viacom would have greatly preferred these page views to have come from its own online video sharing website iFilm, so that it would have been able to receive advertising revenue."

Of course, this was totally bound to happen. Didn't everyone say this would happen? Mark Cuban must be chuckling somewhere. I'd bet Google knew what they were getting into when buying YouTube, so I wonder what their response is going to be.

[Suhit Gupta]

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=6465

"One of cable's largest media conglomorates has opened the litigation against YouTube. Viacom today announced it has filed a lawsuit against Google in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Viacom filed the lawsuit claiming that Google intentionally committed massive copyright infringement of Viacom’s entertainment properties. The lawsuit seeks more than $1 billion in damages, in addition to an injunction that will prohibit Google/YouTube from further copyright infringement. In its statement, Viacom said that “almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom’s programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.” Viacom would have greatly preferred these page views to have come from its own online video sharing website iFilm, so that it would have been able to receive advertising revenue."

Of course, this was totally bound to happen. Didn't everyone say this would happen? Mark Cuban must be chuckling somewhere. I'd bet Google knew what they were getting into when buying YouTube, so I wonder what their response is going to be.