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Viacom sues YouTube for “brazen” copyright infringement

After weeks of bad blood and harsh words between the two companies, Viacom has …

Nate Anderson | 0
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The Viacom/YouTube spat has officially graduated from a "kerfuffle" to a "brouhaha" with the news that Viacom has just sued YouTube in federal court.

The lawsuit seeks massive damages from YouTube for what Viacom terms its "brazen disregard of the intellectual property laws." According to the complaint, Viacom has managed to identify 150,000 of its clips on the service; in total, these clips have been viewed an "astounding" 1.5 billion times. That might sound like incredible free publicity for Viacom, but the company sees it instead as deliberate copyright infringement. Viacom is outraged at having to file "takedown" notices for every single clip, just to see clips of the same material appear again on the site, often the same day.

"YouTube has deliberately chosen this approach because it allows YouTube to profit from infringement while leaving copyright owners insufficient means to prevent it," says the complaint.

Viacom also restates its claim that YouTube is engaged in blackmail by deliberately withholding filtering technologies from companies that do not sign agreements with the online video provider. The goal, says Viacom, is to "coerce rights holders to grant it licenses on favorable terms." YouTube has another explanation: automated video filtering doesn't work well yet.

The complaint also reveals Viacom's fixation on YouTube's value. The $1.65 billion that Google paid last year for YouTube is repeated like a mantra throughout the document—the company has earned those sums by profiting from Viacom content, goes the thinking, and now Viacom wants a big piece of the action.

Google has released a statement in response to the lawsuit. "We are confident that YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders and believe the courts will agree," says the statement. "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."

Pundits last year were predicting that Google (or someone similar) would be foolish to snap up YouTube because of the copyright risks. While the company had largely avoided lawsuits from the major media firms, a deep-pocketed investor was sure to attract legal attention, despite the DMCA "safe harbor" that YouTube claims to have anchored its ship in. But Google has never shied away from taking on content owners over copyright issues, and it looks like the company's lawyers can now add Viacom to the list of authors, publishers, Belgian newspapers, and porn sites who object to a Google-provided service.

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Nate Anderson Deputy Editor
Nate is the deputy editor at Ars Technica. His most recent book is In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World, which is much funnier than it sounds.
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