Last month, Viacom caused a major stink when it demanded YouTube remove all it’s copyrighted materials. YouTube complied and removed 100,000 videos - including some that weren’t infringing on Viacom’s copyright. Since then, all sorts of copyright bickering has gone on.

1) Watchdog group, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), got involved and started requesting that anyone whose materials were unfairly removed because of the blanket search were to contact them as they started building a case.

2) Fox demanded that Google turn over user data on anyone that uploaded unaired episodes of 24 - and Google complied.

3) Copyright lawyer, Wendy Seltzer of ChillingEffects.org, uploaded a snippet from the Super Bowl which stated that all rights, accounts and descriptions of the game were owned by the NFL onto YouTube in an experiment to see if YouTube would remove it. They did within 5 days but after protests that the video was clearly “fair use”, reinstated her video last week.

4) Yesterday, Viacom filed a lawsuit against YouTube in New York for $1 billion in damages - quite steep given that Google paid about $1.7 billion for YouTube last year - because “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.” It is also requesting an injunction that will prohibit Google and YouTube from other copyright infringement.

It will be interesting to see how this one plays out in court. I wouldn’t be surprised if other lawsuits will follow but Google does have a huge chunk of change - $11 billion in cash - to fund their legal defense. It’s going to be difficult for any media company to stop YouTube, which serves over 100 million video streams a day, but that doesn’t mean that lawyers won’t try.