Viacom Files $1 Billion Lawsuit Against YouTube

giant Viacom recently filed a $1 Billion copyright infringement lawsuit against the popular file-sharing site YouTube and its parent company, Google, Inc.

According to the Associated Press, Viacom filed a suit Tuesday (March 13) in U.S. District Court in New York, claiming that YouTube, which was purchased by Google, Inc. this past November for a reported $1.76 billion, has shown 160,000 videos owned by Viacom without the company's permission. Viacom is contending that YouTube "harnessed technology to willfully infringe copyrights on a huge scale" and had "brazen disregard" of intellectual property laws.

In February, Viacom, which owns several cable stations, including MTV, BET, VH1 and Comedy Central, reportedly demanded that the site remove more than 100,000 unauthorized clips but has since discovered an additional 50,000 clips according to Jeremy Zweig, a Viacom spokesperson.

"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.

The company is accusing YouTube of not taking the initiative to stop copyright infringement and rather shoulders the responsibility to the individual copyright holders to monitor if their material is being used illegally.

YouTube has expressed that it cooperates with all of its copyright holders and does in fact remove the material once they are notified. In his company's defense, Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes said in a statement that the company has "not received the lawsuit but (is) confident that YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders and believes the courts will agree." Reyes also went on to say that the suit would not "become a distraction to the continuing growth and strong performance of YouTube," in a statement obtained from MSN.com.

In addition, Alexander Macgillivray, associate general counsel for products and intellectual property at Google, defends the claims by saying that YouTube was protected under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which gives online service providers protection from copyright lawsuits, pending that they acknowledge and comply with requests to remove unauthorized material.

"We're saying that the DMCA protects what we're doing," Macgillivray said in an interview. On the other hand, he said, "The DMCA is silent on what we have to do if we don't get a
notice."



I posted this here because it has already sort have affected us. Pretty much, all your fave videos that you like to look at or, all those classic 2pac videos, biggie videos or new videos from your fave artist can no longer placed on YouTube..meaning in time YouTube will be a bunch of shit that nobody cares about and we have to go back to downloading videos off of Limewire

Or Actually watching them on TV, or going to these artist Websites..The industry must have had a fucking group meeting where they can figure out what they gonna do about the internet...because all of this shit just starts happening and you cant tell me it is a cowinkydink that it is all coming after things that infect album sales or television ratings.

If you haven't already been to youtube since YESTERDAY....thousands of clips no longer work and says they were removed due to copywrite infringement...

So basically music videos from BET and shit anything owned by Viacom..witch is have of the media world should have been removed from YouTube...I know dayum well all of Lloyd's stuff is gone

Yeah, I saw this on the news the other day. Time to find another video sharing site.............LOL

there are a lot of them Onsmash.com and so many more but youtube was da biggest one

Google video has a lot of shit too but prolly not no more lol

fuck that blows


at least my shits still up

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=http:...?v=rT0E3NhGh6Y

lol so all them videos on myspace ppl post aint goin work too and peoples websites and shit

welcome to the fall of youtube

man fuck viacom, they took over BET in 01 that meant that there was no more real black programming after that, thats why BET is a bunch of bullshit now a days they got white people makin black shows wtf is up with that now there taking youtube away?

they got white people running the black shows, not making them. still doesnt help.

yea thas true...shit dont make any since...besides it aint like ppl goin on there sellin tha videos 4 they own profit...alot of em r jus 2 laugh at...but yea like dude said...welcome 2 tha fall of youtube...

note that google also owns part of youtube so google video and all sorts of shit from google may change

cause google is part orner of youtube

I saw videos saying they were removed because of a dispute with viacom for the longest time

I dont get why they just dont blame the user for it, youtube makes it clear before you upload anything make sure you own the copy write to it.

Like the ppl who work for youtube gonna sit there and watch the thousands of videos uploaded aday thats alot of shyt to keep up with.

Just like that bullshit with rapidshare, like everyones gonna sit there and unzip your files and check everything in it and make sure its not copywrittin. Most of it they dont even know nor never seen.

Im not worried at all if its media theres alwayz gonna be some way to get it.

as a person i agree with u

as a business person i say youtube is still responsible

for the simple fact your videos go through a varification period so what are they doing to varify actually besides making sure it is a video?

but because of that disclaimer they have they may get off

fuck viacom. they just after all that money. damn bitches. i guess this is why youtube talking about "charging" people to use youtube.

That's the same thing I said when I saw it on the news. They tryna make it seem like it's just a Mr. Youtube-Man who goes and puts the shit up there but users upload the videos. I just sat and watched a whole fuckin' movie on youtube that a "USER" posted. If they wanna sue someone, sue the -----z uploadin' the shit, not the site.