Viacom also applied to a New York district court for an injunction to stop YouTube from allowing Viacom copyrighted material to appear on its site.
The complaint contends that nearly 160,000 “unauthorised” clips from Viacom television programming have been available on YouTube and had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.
Viacom the Google and YouTube strategy had been to avoid taking steps to curtail infringement on their sites, shifting the burden and cost of monitoring YouTube to the victims of its infringement.
“There is no question that YouTube and Google are continuing to take the fruit of our efforts without permission and destroying enormous value in the process,” Viacom said in a statement.”
“YouTube is a significant, for-profit organisation 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,” the company said.
Viacom said YouTube’s actions were “in stark contrast” to other content distributors, and that “after a great deal of unproductive negotiation” on the issue the company was taking action to stop YouTube and Google “continuing to steal value.”
Google says it is confident that YouTube has respected the rights of content owners, and that the company has also given those owners opportunities to create new audiences among younger viewers.
Google's General Counsel Kent Walker said “YouTube has become even more popular since we took down Viacom's material. We think that's a testament to the draw of the user-generated
content on YouTube.”
“We've been very successful forging thousands of successful partnerships with content owners – like Warner Music, Sony/BMG, Universal Music, BBC, and the NBA – interested in finding new audiences for their programming,” Mr Walker said.
“These partnerships offer the YouTube community access to some of the best content in the world, ranging from entertainment and sports to politics and news. And we're only getting started.”
Google acquired YouTube for US$1.6 billion last November as a natural extension in the video space of its own search business.
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