U.S. entertainment giant Viacom sued
Google and its subsidiary video sharing website YouTube Tuesday for
copyright infringement on "a massive scale," seeking more than one billion
dollars from the Silicon Valley company.(AFP Photo) Photo
Gallery>>>
LOS
ANGELES, March 13 (Xinhua) -- U.S. entertainment giant Viacom sued Google and
its subsidiary video sharing website YouTube Tuesday for copyright infringement
on "a massive scale," seeking more than one billion dollars from the Silicon
Valley company.
The suit, which was filed in New York on Tuesday
morning, alleges that YouTube has posted on its site more than 160,000
unauthorized clips of movies and TV shows from Viacom's cable networks. It also
sought an injunction barring Google and YouTube from further copyright
infringement.
Google purchased the popular YouTube in November for
1.7 billion dollars and began negotiating with Viacom and other entertainment
giants for the right to carry their content on YouTube.
But the talks broke down in part because Google
declined to putfilters in place that would have flagged copyrighted content.
Viacom, which is based in New York, said that YouTube
failed to take "reasonable precautions" to halt the rampant infringement on its
site, which was created for people to share their amateur videos but quickly
became known for Hollywood programming.
"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," said a Viacom statement.
"Their business model, which is based on building
traffic and selling advertising off unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and
in obvious conflict with copyright laws," it said.
Google Tuesday issued a statement in response to the
lawsuit, saying its YouTube site has respected the legal rights of copyright
holders and provided them opportunities to interact with users and promote their
content.
Major entertainment companies in the United States
and Japan have initiated legal processes against Google and YouTube under the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a U.S. law the governs uses of digital
content, but Viacom's suit is the first suit filed by a company of a similar
size as Google.
Viacom reported annual profits of 1.6 billion dollars
on revenues of 11.5 billion dollars last year, while Google reported profits of
3 billion dollars on revenues of 10.6 billion dollars.
BEIJING, March 10 -- Google Inc Chief Executive Officer
Eric Schmidt has said media companies will someday see the light because to lure
viewers, they have no choice but to put their TV shows and movies on video sites
such as his firm's YouTube.
"Eventually all of the copyrighted content will be
available on virtually all of the sites," said Schmidt, who is tussling over
copyrights with Viacom Inc. "The growth of YouTube, the growth of online, is so
fundamental that these companies are going to be forced to work with and in the
Internet," Schmidt said in an interview at Google headquarters in Mountain View,
California. Full
story>>
Print
