Breaking: Youtube gets sued for $1 billion by Viacom

By Vivek | March 13th, 2007 at 08:58 am ET         

Long expected doomsday seems to be near for Youtube. Viacom today filed a suit against Youtube in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York seeking $1 billion in damages from the leading video sharing site. Viacom had been negotiating with Youtube for past few months to enable legal content hosting on Youtube. However the talks fell through as both parties were not able to reach a amicable agreement. Since than Viacom had ordered Youtube to pull off 100,000 copyrighted video clips from the site. As part of the lawsuit, Viacom claims that they have identified more than 150,000 unauthorized clips of their copyrighted programming on YouTube that had been viewed an 1.5 billion times and never got paid for.

Viacom had entered into a partnership with Joost last month to enable legal content viewing by its users. This puts Viacom on one side while rest of the media industry on the other out of which most have already partnered with Google/Youtube. Google/Youtube had been rolling out content syndication partnerships ever since the acquisition last year. According to some news reports last week, Youtube is supposed to have signed deals with around 1000 content providers. That is a big number as compared to what any other video-sharing site have been able to achieve. However even a single lawsuit like this one can pretty much wipe out Google’s media syndication dreams.

Again, Viacom  can be very wrong with this move. Users are not really looking for their TV quality content online. Had that been the case they would have come directly to their sites in the first place. Suing Youtube to oblivion can make Viacom  happy right now but won’t get it the users.

This lawsuit comes just days after Bolt.com was ordered by court to pay Vivendi $10 million in case of copyright infringement.

I will keep updating this story as it evolves.

Links:
Viacom Sues Google Over YouTube Clips