Viacom Sues YouTube For $1 Billion

Posted on March 15, 2007

Viacom is suing Youtube.com for copyright violation. The lawsuit asks for $1 billion in damages, according to Business Week. Viacom claims that YouTube's entire business is based on the illegal and willful use of copyrighted material. There are lots of clips from Viacom owned shows on the video sharing site.

Last month, Viacom demanded that YouTube remove more than 100,000 unauthorized clips from its site, and since that time, the company has uncovered more than 50,000 additional unauthorized clips, Viacom spokesman Jeremy Zweig said.
A quick search of YouTube's site turned up numerous clips from Viacom programs including segments from Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and Nickelodeon's "SpongeBob SquarePants" cartoon.
In the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, Viacom says YouTube "harnessed technology to willfully infringe copyrights on a huge scale" and had "brazen disregard" of intellectual property laws.
Viacom is especially at risk because many of its shows are aimed at younger viewers who also are heavy Internet users. At the same time, Viacom is trying to find other, legal ways to distribute its shows digitally, such as by selling episodes of "The Daily Show" and "South Park" for $1.99 each through Apple Inc.'s iTunes service. Those shows can then be viewed on a computer or iPod.

YouTube says that it removed copyrighted material when it is notified of an infringement. YouTube is now owned by Google. Many other major companies have cut deals with YouTube, after first threatening lawsuits. We think that over time YouTube will most likely reach a deal with all the major media companies for some kind of licensing agreement that allows the embedding of advertisements to pay for the free content.