Viacom Inc. announced today that it has filed a complaint against YouTube and Google for massive intentional copyright infringement of Viacom's entertainment properties. The complaint was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The lawsuit prays the issuance of an injunction prohibiting Google and YouTube from further copyright infringement. Also, an award of more than $1 billion in damages is sought. The complaint alleges that almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom's programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

In a statement, Viacom said:

YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others' creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google. 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. In fact, YouTube's strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site, thus generating significant traffic and revenues for itself while shifting the entire burden - and high cost - of monitoring YouTube onto the victims of its infringement.