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.