This morning, Viacom announced that it is suing YouTube and Google for "massive intentional copyright infringement of Viacom's entertainment properties". In today's press release, Viacom is seeking $1 Billion in damages claiming that thousands of clips have been freely available on YouTube with over 1.5 billion video plays.

Viacom has released the following statement regarding the filing:

"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."

Labels: google, lawsuits, viacom lawsuit, youtube