Negotiations between Viacom, YouTube and Google have gone down the gurgler, with maniacally evil yet happy laughter no doubt emanating from the lawyers who are set to work on what could be the most spectacular media lawsuit of 2007 – Viacom suing YouTube, with a lawsuit filed today in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

After all, no matter what happens, the lawyers always win, but let’s forget about lawyers for a moment and take a look at what Viacom says in their statement on their website about this astounding, yet expected lawsuit.

In their statement, Viacom say that Google and YouTube have engaged in ‘massive intentional copyright infringement of Viacom’s entertainment properties’ and not only do they want a cool US $1 billion, but they also want an injunction prohibiting Google and YouTube from further copyright infringement. 

Viacom say that “almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom’s programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times”, with Viacom no doubt wishing all of those page views had come from their online properties, rather than YouTube’s, as Viacom would surely have picked up some wonderful advertising revenue from all of that juicy exposure.    

Viacom further explained in their statement that: “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.” 

The statement pulls no punches as they continue by saying that: “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”.

But that’s not all. Viacom really are very, very annoyed, and pull no punches when they say that: “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”. 

And therefore, Viacom feel that they have no choice but to take on the world’s most popular search engine and video download website in the history of the Internet by taking serious legal action. Viacom finish their statement by saying that: “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.”

YouTube’s users are probably not very impressed by Viacom’s actions, and might label it as a ‘Viacon’. But Viacom feel they are well within their rights as one of the world’s major content producers, with the following brand names under their belt: MTV: Music Television, VH1, CMT: Country Music Television, Logo, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, Comedy Central, Spike TV, TV Land. They also have digital assets including MTV.com, comedycentral.com, VSPOT, TurboNick, Neopets, Xfire and iFilm; BET Networks; Paramount Pictures; DreamWorks; and Famous Music. 

The big question now is: did Google massively overpay for YouTube, or is the bill about to get a whole lot bigger? No-one seriously thinks YouTube will ever be switched off, but the battle for dominance in the Internet video and TV space is only going to get more ferocious!
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