Viacom Sued by YouTube Parody Creators

Viacom, which recently filed a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube, was itself sued on Thursday by activist groups representing the producers of a parody video who say Viacom made an illegal request that the video be removed from YouTube.


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Viacom Sues Google, YouTube for 1 Billion Dollars

Viacom announced that it has filed a $1 billion federal copyright infringement lawsuit against video-sharing site YouTube and Google.

Viacom said that almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of its programming -- the company's holdings include Paramount Pictures, MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon -- have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times on YouTube.

"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," Viacom said in a statement.

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YouTube Wrongful Viacom Copyright Claims

The YouTube's filmmaker page bore a notice that said: "This video has been removed at the request of copyright owner Viacom International because its content was used without permission."

"That note said to anyone looking for my trailer that I violated someone's copyright. And that isn't true. That's where they defamed me," filmmaker said.

Viocom said it regrets its errors.

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Google Accused of Aiding Movie Pirates

One more for Google...

Media firms including News Corp., Viacom, Sony, NBC Universal, Disney and Time Warner have accused Google of enabling piracy by selling keyword ads for sites that offered illegal movie downloads, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

Google held negotiations with the media firms on Friday, and said that it would remove objectionable ads and refrain from selling ads to sites that sell pirated content.

P.S. Attention Google Salespeople: you enable software piracy by allowing sites to sell illigal software, please stop that as well.