Viacom Finally Sued YouTube!

Viacom, the owner of Comedy Central and MTV, announced today that it filed a lawsuit against the online video service YouTube for copyright infringement. The company sustained YouTube used its content without authorization and is now requiring $1 billion in damages. Viacom filed the lawsuit at the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York, accusing Google of "massive intentional copyright infringement" as The Washington Post reported.

"YouTube's strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site. 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 said in a statement. Viacom said its decision to sue Google followed "a great deal of unproductive negotiation" with the company," the same publication sustained.

The decision is quite interesting because I really don't think Viacom has a chance of winning the lawsuit as the company demanded YouTube some time ago to remove almost 100.000 clips from the page. At that time, MTV's owner sustained the video service used its content without authorization and received praises for the movies provided by other publishers. The story is at least interesting because Viacom tried to reply to the removal by making another partnership with Joost, a peer-to-peer application developed by Skype's founders.

YouTube also tried to reply to the removal by making several partnerships with numerous companies including NBA, Chelsea FC and BBC. These agreements were especially meant to create a new YouTube channel to distribute certain content using newly created pages. Several publications sustained the video service made more than 1.000 partnerships, YouTube recording an impressive boost of traffic just after the Viacom removal.