By Premier League

May 7, 2007 18:51 GMT  ·  By

The Premier League officially announced that it sues Google's online video sharing service YouTube for copyright infringement. It all started after YouTube published several soccer clips that were actually uploaded without authorization, the football association deciding to send Google to the judge. The complaint registered at the United States District Court for the District of New York sustains the online video sharing service published several clips owned by the association that were viewed by a considerable number of visitors while the search giant didn't pay for it.

"The $1.65 billion paid by Google to purchase YouTube in 2006, and the concomitant $4 billion increase in Google's market capitalisation, vastly understates both the value of the intellectual property rights of the class that YouTube has misappropriated and the harm to the class caused by defendants' unlawful conduct," it is mentioned in the complaint according to EFY Times.

As I said several times, YouTube is continuously sued for copyright infringement as its users are able to upload any type of content without powerful filters to flag the clips as inappropriate. Viacom, Daniela Cicarelli and now NBC, they all sued YouTube for uploading clips without authorization. Recently, the Google CEO Eric Schmidt sustained the search giant is preparing a special copyright utility, codenamed Claim Your Content that will help the company fight against those cases. Because the feature was prepared just after the Google acquisition but the company refused to launch it, YouTube attracted several firms' criticism, all of them sustaining the search giant doesn't want to stop copyright infringement.