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Viacom Sues Google Over YouTube for $1 Billion

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday March 13, 2007 @02:48AM from the everyone-get-their-doctor-evil-fingers-up dept.

Snowgen writes "Viacom has filed a $1,000,000,000.00 lawsuit for 'massive intentional copyright infringement' against Google over YouTube video clips. '"YouTube's strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site," Viacom said in a statement. "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.'"

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Here's the PDF of the actual complaint ... by xmas2003 · 2007-03-13 03:00 · Score: 4, Informative

US District Court Filing

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Re:What the by 91degrees · 2007-03-13 03:14 · Score: 5, Informative

Probably. And it appears to have been part of the intent of the DMCA. However the act was pretty badly drafted, and part of it does depend on whether Google is directly profitting from the infringement.

Of course, in Youtube's favour, is the fact that the service clearly isn't intended as a vehicle for copyright infringement. Most of the material there is actually the home video stuff that the site is intended for, and they are making efforts to remove the material immediately.