Viacom hits YouTube & Google with $1Billion lawsuit
By Craig Childs
After Google’s failure to remove thousands of Viacom owned videos from their site, YouTube, the media company has hit back with a $1 Billion lawsuit.
You may recall Google and Viacom, who owns content from MTV, VH1 and Comedy Central, were in talks to make a deal. However, before a deal was made to host their content on YouTube, Viacom insisted almost 160,000 unauthorized videos be removed.
Unhappy with Google’s progress in the matter, Viacom backed out of any talks and signed with the comparitively unkown video-sharing site, Joost.
“After months of ongoing discussions with YouTube and Google, it has become clear that YouTube is unwilling to come to a fair market agreement that would make Viacom content available to YouTube users,” Viacom said in a statement. “Filtering tools promised repeatedly by YouTube and Google have not been put in place, and they continue to host and stream vast amounts of unauthorized video.”
“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.”
Unphased by the attack by Viacom, Google is willing to battle the copyright infringement case in Federal Court. Depending on the outcome of this case, we could see a clear shift for or against online video sharing.
Google is definitely big enough to battle this one out, and if successful, should ease into some fantastic deals with other large media companies. Their failure in this realm means YouTube will need to rely on original and user-generated content almost entirely, while sites like Joost enjoy the rest.
“We have not received the lawsuit,” Google said in a statement, “but are confident that YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders and believe the courts will agree. YouTube is great for users and offers real opportunities to rights holders: the opportunity to interact with users; to promote their content to a young and growing audience; and to tap into the online advertising market. We will certainly not let this suit become a distraction to the continuing growth and strong performance of YouTube and its ability to attract more users, more traffic and build a stronger community.”
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