Perhaps it was inevitable. On March 13, Viacom sued YouTube and Google for “massive intentional copyright infringement.” The owner of the Daily Show, Comedy Central and other popular entertainment properties is seeking $1 billion in damages and an end to the infringing behavior. The suit challenges both the wisdom of Google’s decision to purchase YouTube and the viability of YouTube’s business model.
The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the southern district of New York. The complaint runs to 27 pages in a PDF document. If you'd rather not read the entire filing, Viacom issued a press release to cover the most egregious violations. The charges center around 160,000 clips of Viacom's programming that have been available on YouTube without Viacom's consent. Viacom maintains that these videos have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.
That represents a serious loss of revenue for Viacom; on top of that, Google and YouTube are profiting from these videos because of the ads running on YouTube (I'll provide more details on that in a bit). Indeed, Viacom maintains that their business model is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content," which is "clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws."
To judge from the rest of the press release, Viacom feels as if it was forced to go to court. It has been negotiating with Google and YouTube for months in an attempt to come to a satisfactory licensing agreement. In February it demanded that YouTube take down 100,000 videos that it believed infringed its copyrights, and YouTube agreed to do so. But since then Viacom has found many more infringing videos; it has also discovered that many YouTube users will re-post infringing videos after they are removed, making only minor changes, sometimes within hours of the original video being removed.
Does Viacom's case have merit? The question is more than academic, since Viacom is hardly the only content producer whose copyrighted material is showing up on YouTube. Some have wondered if this could lead to a huge class action lawsuit; others contend that it's unlikely other entertainment companies will start suing the wildly popular video hosting web site. While I am definitely not a lawyer, I'll do my best to walk you through the various points of the complaint, as well as the background leading up to it.
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