Viacom is suing Google in a billion dollar lawsuit for a massive copyright infringement by Youtube. In a statement while filing for the lawsuit, Viacom said that “Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws.”

Viacom’s empire includes a lot of youth-oriented TV networks, for instance MTV, VH1 and Nickelodeon as well as the Paramount and Dreamworks movie studios.

This suits is seeking more than one billion dollars in damages. However, according to industry insiders, Viacom is actually trying to use the lawsuit as negotiation tactics to get Youtube to remove the illegal contents from it’s website and has no real intention to go on with the trial.

In my opinion, this is just another grey area between the freedom and rights of users worldwide in using the websphere to express themselves and the service provider is just providing great service to the world. Google argued that according to the 1998 US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Internet firms are not responsible for what Internet users put on websites. However, I think it’s possible that Google and Youtube already has the technologies to block copyrighted materials on their website. They are just not willing to implement it because it’ll impose a lot of restriction to its users. This will force users to search for alternatives.

In a nutshell, Google and Youtube want to retain members.

What’s your view on this?