Viacom yesterday made an official announcement that it has filed a lawsuit against YouTube and Google for massive intentional copyright infringement of Viacom's entertainment properties seeking a whooping $1 Billion in damages. Viacom claims that Google and YouTube have programmed more than 1,60,000 clips without any authorization. And these clips have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

A press release states:

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.

If Google loses this lawsuit, it definitely will not work in their favor since they have recently acquired YouTube.

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