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Viacom Slaps Google with $1B YouTube Lawsuit

Accusing YouTube of “massive intentional copyright infringement,” media giant Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit Tuesday against the video site and its parent Google, CNET reports (via MarketingVox).

Some 160,000 clips of Viacom programming have been illegally available on YouTube and have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times, Viacom said. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and also seeks an injunction prohibiting Google and YouTube from further copyright infringement.

“YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others’ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google. 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.

“In fact, YouTube’s strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site, thus generating significant traffic and revenues for itself while shifting the entire burden - and high cost - of monitoring YouTube onto the victims of its infringement,” Viacom said in a statement.
In February, Viacom ordered YouTube to remove more than 100,000 clips of its programming, representing some 1.2 billion video streams. YouTube said that it would comply with Viacom’s request.

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Fox Says ‘Fringe’ Viewers Pay Attention to Lack of Ads

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Global Mobile Phone Sales to Grow 11% in 2008

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Even Wealthy Cut Spending as Inflation, Housing Concerns Intensify

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