A look at what's at stake in Viacom Inc.'s $1 billion copyright infringement suit against Google.
SHERMAN OAKS, CALIF. - At an Internet cafe here, Barry Delatto toggles his computer screen from stock prices to e-mail and finds a URL for YouTube, the free website where users can post and watch video clips.
"It's [an e-mail] from my girlfriend," he says, clicking on a clip from the "Colbert Report," a mock-news TV show on Comedy Central. "I better watch this before the courts shut YouTube down. Either that, or make them pay so much nobody will do this anymore."
It's a scene repeated so often – 160,000 free video clips viewed at least 1.5 billion times – that Comedy Central's parent company, Viacom Inc., is asking the courts to make YouTube stop unauthorized postings of copyrighted video. . . .
[V]iacom's lawsuit, filed March 13 in a US District Court in New York, seeks $1 billion in damages and asks the court to make YouTube, acquired by Google last year, halt the practice.
Details here from Daniel B. Wood of the Christian Science Monitor.