This short item appeared in the Wall Street Journal (behind a firewall but short Reuters piece is here) a few minutes ago claiming that Viacom has sued YouTube in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The entertainment giant, which publicly broke from the Google-owned video service in February following failed negotiations, is seeking $1 billion in damages as well as an injunction against YouTube.
“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,” Viacom said in a press release. “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.”
I just need more information here — on what grounds is Viacom suing YouTube? Didn’t Viacom already request, per the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, that YouTube pull down 100,000 of its videos? Didn’t YouTube comply? Isn’t that the end of the case?
Or is Viacom arguing that the DMCA never meant to apply to online “service providers” such as Google but instead is limited to ISPs, as some have argued?
Stay tuned.
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:28 AM|Comments(0)
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