Google and YouTube sued for 1 billion dollars

[Lori]

Viacom Sues YouTube Over Copyrights

Big Media took its first big swing at YouTube Tuesday as Viacom Inc., the owner of MTV, VH1, Comedy Central and other cable networks filed a $1 billion copyright lawsuit against the video-sharing site and corporate owner Google Inc.
The lawsuit marks a sharp escalation of long-simmering tensions between Viacom and YouTube and represents the biggest confrontation to date between a major media company and the hugely popular site, which Google bought in November for $1.76 billion.

Last month Viacom demanded that YouTube remove more than 100,000 unauthorized clips from its site, and since that time the company has uncovered more than 50,000 additional unauthorized clips, Viacom spokesman Jeremy Zweig said.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8NRFPTO3&show_article=1

[umop ap!sdn]

Knew this was going to happen.

[Lucy]

It had 2 sooner or l8r

[Amanda Barber]

As much as I hate to see it happen, as much as I dislike viacom, there IS alot of stuff on You Tube that is a clear violation of copyright law. There are entire TV shows spit up into 12-15 minute vids.

Our cartoon music videos using warcraft screen shots and Frap software is probably a grey area, maybe (hopefully) protected under parody clauses and Blizzard doesn't seem to mind. Putting up entire southpark, nip tuck, startrek episodes is going to get the site shut down or at least hammered so hard that its not viable to run.

Of course the conspiricy nut in me might say that Viacom planted all that content in order to get injunctions and leverage to ban all clips so inconvienent news clips couldn't be propogated over and over again.
~~~~ but thats just the nut in me  ~~~~