Jon Holato

Today Viacom filed a lawsuit in US District Court against YouTube and Google for massive international copyright infringement of Viacom’s entertainment properties (MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central). The injunction seeks $1 billion in damages, in addition to an injunction that prevents the two companies from further copyright infringement. In terms of damages, Viacom claims that there are 160,000 clips on YouTube which have been viewed in excess of 1.5 billion times.

Viacom released the following statement:

“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. 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.”

This is a pretty harsh statement from Viacom against YouTube. Basically they’re accusing YouTube of not only knowingly allowing copyright infringement, but also deliberately encouraging it in an effort to boost profits. Whether this is the case remains to be seen in court, but this is a very important case for everyone. It is important to us all because whatever happens will become precedent when it comes to online video infringement issues. If Viacom wins you can bet it will be targeting other major players like MySpace Video, Daily Motion and iFilm. I only hope the judicial system has evolved with the internet so that we don’t see Napster litigation all over again.