14 DAY TRIAL // The famous bluegrass mandolin player David Grisman and his partner Craig Miller decided to take YouTube to the court, accusing the parent company Google for copyright infringement. The two musicians working under the Dawg Music trademark sustained that the online video sharing service used their content without authorization and filed a complaint against the company. Although the reason is not quite clear and no other details are provided, the complaint was registered at a Californian court and involved the recently acquired Google video service.
Last week, the English soccer league filed a similar complaint against Google, sustaining that numerous clips created by the Premier League were uploaded on YouTube without authorization. According to Google Watch, the Premier League officials mentioned in the complaint that the "defendants are pursuing a deliberate strategy of engaging in, permitting, encouraging, and facilitating massive copyright infringement on the YouTube website".
However, the Mountain View company is somehow used to these complaints because it was often sent to the judge after the companies accused it for copyright infringement. The last and the best known lawsuit was filed by Viacom, the owner of MTV and Comedy Central that sued Google for the same reason: publishing videos without authorization. However, the entire case was at least interesting because Viacom first contacted Google demanding the removal of no more than 100.000 clips from the page. Obviously, the Mountain View company agreed and started the removal, but the MTV owner went even further and took Google to court, demanding $1 billion in damages.
Just after the lawsuit was announced, an impressive fight was started, both companies aiming to make the other one more envious than before. For example, Viacom tried to partner with some of the most important YouTube rivals to attract the same segment of users. Google replied with a simple move: it announced that its number of visitors was boosted just after the Viacom removal was officially confirmed.