South Park Creators Drag on YouTube - Viacom Lawsuit

It doesn't spring to mind very often now that YouTube is making friends with all the big content creators, but the site is still involved in a now three-year-old lawsuit with Viacom over copyrighted material popping up on the video sharing site. The billion-dollar lawsuit was filed in early 2007 and still hasn't gone to court. Things are moving forward, though, and Cnet has uncovered some interesting, if not exactly crucial, developments. Google attorneys have now questioned Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report, but South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker were less cooperative.

Google had been trying to depose Colbert, along with other performers linked to Viacom, from very early in the trial, but has finally managed to do so only recently. Few people know what the deposition uncovered, if anything, but Colbert himself has acknowledged that it took place.

"I can't tell you what happened in the deposition, but it was great! I can tell you the lawyers would say, 'Are you asking Stephen the person or Stephen the character?' The whole deposition was in front of two people! I had a coffee cup, and I would move it from side to side to differentiate who I was answering for. It was insane," Colbert told the New York Post a couple of weeks ago.

Apparently, Jon Stewart of the Daily Show also gave a deposition. On the other hand Stone and Parker have failed to provide the Google attorneys with the documents they had previously requested. They were not required for a deposition. Google has now asked the judge to force the two to come up with the documents which they now claim will be provided "in a timely way."

The reason why Google is interested in questioning Colbert and other performers is that the company is trying to establish that Viacom's own employees were responsible for some of the videos posted on the site. If it can prove this, it would greatly help its argument that it couldn't do more about the copyrighted material on YouTube available in the early days, as there was no way to differentiate between legitimate content posted by authorized people, or at least Viacom employees, and the content illegally uploaded.