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Viacom and its companies file a copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube and Google seeking at least $1 billion in damages.
The media company charges that “YouTube has harnessed technology to willfully infringe copyrights on a huge scale,” by taking “the value of creative content on a massive scale for YouTube’s benefit without payment or license. The suit alleges that the copyright infringement is on such a large scale that it “identified more than 150,000 unauthorized clips of their copyrighted programming on YouTube that had been viewed an astounding 1.5 billion times.”
Viacom details the "legitimate licensed channels" that it works with to distribute the company's copyrigh-protected content. These partners include Apple's iTUnes Music Store and Joost.
The suit also charges that YouTube selectively deploys filtering technology "[b]y limiting copyright protectiong to business partners who have agreed to grant it licenses," even though copyright holders are entitled to protection of their works under federal copyright law without such business agreements.
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