14 DAY TRIAL // The lawsuit between Google and Viacom is now turning into a Comedy Central episode as the Mountain View company asked for testimony two of the famous comedians who appeared in Viacom's show: Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. The Register informs that YouTube created a list with 32 persons which includes the two comedians and also Viacom chief executive officer Philippe Dauma. The list states that it might be modified if the case evolves but the Mountain View company looks prepared to fight against Viacom until it wins the lawsuits.
If you didn't know, the case between Google and Viacom started a long time ago when the media giant demanded the search company to remove approximately 100.000 clips from the page. The main reason was that Google receives money and praises using the content provided by other companies and it is not even paying for it. Google agreed with the demands and started the removal of the videos. Soon after that, Viacom shocked: it announced that it decided to sue YouTube and its parent company as it didn't manage to remove all the clips provided by it.
What's most interesting is that Viacom also requested $1 billion in damages, an impressive amount of money when we think that Google paid no less than $1.65 billion in October 2006 when it acquired YouTube. Because it removed a huge number of clips from its database, Google's online video sharing platform was forced to recover them somehow and it started a powerful campaign of deals which were signed with several companies from all around the world.
The main goal was to obtain video content that can be placed on the official page of the service and that is also able to boost the number of visitors. YouTube even announced that it managed to make no less than 1000 partnerships and new agreement might be signed soon.