Viacom Sues Google and YouTube For $1 Billion Dollars

No surprise here, we all knew it was coming. Today, Viacom announced that it was suing YouTube and its corporate parent Google for alleged copyright infringement and is seeing more than $1 billion dollars in damages. Viacom is seeking an injunction prohibiting Google and YouTube from using any of its content on their websites.

In it's press release Viacom said, "“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."

There is both good and bad to this. The good is that online video will continue to get more exposure in the press and with consumers because of all the coverage this suit will get. The bad is that many people will still reference online video as a product that no one has been able to create a business model from. While that is not true, perception is reality in any industry and even more so in the Internet space.

This should make for some interesting times as I expect we'll now get to hear even more information about Google and YouTube that we didn't know about before regarding their business, the buyout and potentially revenue. The comments form is open.