Another YouTube lawsuit: Viacom joins in on the fun

Uber ginormous media entity Viacom has gotten into the how-’bout-our-company-sues-YouTube-too game. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York claiming YouTube partook in “massive intentional copyright infringement of Viacom’s entertainment properties.”

Viaconglomerate is seeking $1 billion in damages and an injunction to stop all that copyright infringement – pretty much stop being YouTubish – claiming that nearly 160,000 illegal video clips of its products can be found on the vid clip site. The suit follows Viacom’s request earlier this year that YouTube remove more than 100,000 videos.

Viacom is the parent company of so very many media products including Comedy Central, BET, CMT, iFilm, Logo, SpikeTV, TVLand, VH1, MTV, gametrailers.com, neopets, Nick@Night, Noggin, Paramount Pictures, Dreamworks and eventually everyone’s soul.

Here’s Viacong’s official statement:

“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.

This behavior stands in stark contrast to the actions of other significant distributors, who have recognized the fair value of entertainment content and have concluded agreements to make content legally available to their customers around the world.

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. This is value that rightfully belongs to the writers, directors and talent who create it and companies like Viacom that have invested to make possible this innovation and creativity.

After a great deal of unproductive negotiation, and remedial efforts by ourselves and other copyright holders, YouTube continues in its unlawful business model. Therefore, we must turn to the courts to prevent Google and YouTube from continuing to steal value from artists and to obtain compensation for the significant damage they have caused.”

Again, YouTube doesn’t post illegal material,YouTube’s USERS do! Of course, suing the l’il guy or gal posting to the site would be a PR nightmare for any company as large as Viacommie. (I’m expecting Clear Channel to jump on the lawsuit bandwagon any time now.) I wonder if The Colbert Show’s jokes about YouTube will continue…

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