Well, it happened. YouTube is facing a $1 billion+ lawsuit from Viacom today. It was known that YouTube would eventually face at least one major lawsuit, and Viacom - which had already pulled 100,000 clips from the site, was perhaps the most likely to take a distaste to the company

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Viacom is accusing YouTube of “massive intentional copyright infringement”, saying that 160,000 unauthorized Viacom clips have been uploaded onto YouTube, totaling more than 1.5 billion views. In truth, the “more than $1 billion” figure sounds a little low: typically these companies seek the maximum sum of $150,000 per infringement. This was the case with Bolt.com, which decided to settle for $10 million rather than endure a lengthy legal battle against Universal.

Viacom, owner of MTV and Nickelodeon, put out a release regarding the YouTube case today, with the following statement:

There is no question that YouTube and Google are continuing to take the fruit of our efforts without permission and destroying enormous value in the process. This is value that rightfully belongs to the writers, directors and talent who create it and companies like Viacom that have invested to make possible this innovation and creativity.

So this is the ultimate showdown: a test whether you can “pull a YouTube” and get away with it. YouTube, frankly, has moved the video market forward faster than any other player, and that high risk game is ultimately good for users. If it had been left to Viacom and its ilk to move forward with Internet TV, we’d still be watching everything in Windows Media or Realplayer format, with no progress made over the past two years. These companies didn’t innovate, and suddenly found themselves contending with a young upstart that was driving more viewers to their content than they ever could. Fearing loss of control, particularly of the distribution channel, suing seemed like the best option for a company that’s anti-innovation. That said, YouTube was also so incredibly slow to roll out its copy protection, and only delivered a deal with AudibleMagic when we expected an in-house solution, that it gave these lawsuits the opportunity to bubble up.,

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