New Media Giants Flex Their Litigation Muscles

On March 13, 2007, entertainment giant Viacom Inc (Viacom), the owner of MTV, VH1, Comedy Central and other cable networks, filed a $1 billion copyright lawsuit against the video-sharing web site YouTube and its corporate owner, Google Inc (Google). In addition to damages, the lawsuit seeks an injunction prohibiting Google and YouTube from further copyright infringement. Viacom alleges that almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of its programming have been available on YouTube and that the clips have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times. In the lawsuit, filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, Viacom contends that YouTube "harnessed technology to willfully infringe copyrights on a huge scale" and had shown "brazen disregard" of intellectual property laws. Negotiations between Viacom and YouTube broke down in February and Viacom demanded that YouTube remove more than 100,000 "unauthorized" clips from its site. Other media companies, such as Warner Music Group, CBS and the BBC, have reached licensing deals with YouTube. Google responded by way of a public statement that it was confident that YouTube had respected the legal rights of copyright holders. In a related story, media giants News Corp and NBC Universal announced on March 22, 2007 that they will create an online video site to rival YouTube. For news stories related to the law suit, see: http://tinyurl.com/3xxykx; and http://tinyurl.com/2t7ey3 For a statement released by Viacom, visit: http://tinyurl.com/34xzdz For the text of Viacom's complaint, see: http://www.latimes.com/media/acrobat/2007-03/28389399.pdf Summary by: Clare McCurley