Viacom and Google. $1 Billion Dollar Copyright Battle
Tuesday, March 13, 2007 at 01:13PM The war between Google and Viacom is on! Viacom, owner of MTV, Comedy Central, and Nickelodean is suing Google for $1 billion dollars for copyright infringements. Viacom says that Google has done nothing to put filtering in place to stop content that belongs to them from being posted on Google’s YouTube. On February 2, 2006, Viacom demanded that Google remove over 100,000 of their videos from Google’s YouTube website. Google promised that they would. It’s now, March 13th and Viacom has said, “you’ve had enough time”. 100,000 videos to remove? Sounds to me like that would be quite a chore. Jeez, Viacom. If you want it done sooner, why not send some techs over there to help out the YouTube crew?
“They filter pornography, they filter for hate,” said Carl Folta, Viacom executive vice president for corporate relations. “But how is it they can’t recognize Jon Stewart?
Google, on the other hand, has helped sell Viacom to sell ad-supported MTV Networks video content to Web publishers and video downloads for $1.99 each.
Hmmm…. another interesting part of this story for me is that fact that Google execs had just announced that they were willing to take $1 as a salary again this year. Maybe, they’ve been putting away the rest of the money in to a YouTube legal fund. Hmm….
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