In the year 2007, one of the biggest media networks, Viacom had filed a copyright infringement case against, one of the leading online video sharing websites, YouTube, arguing that, YouTube permitted the uploading of more than 100,000 videos that contained copyrighted material owned by Viacom. Now, the ensuing legal battle between these two entities has been made public by the U.S. District Court for all people to see.

As per the documents, it seems that, Viacom had its eyes set on YouTube for a long time, as the company had approached the video website with intentions of acquiring it in the year 2006. However, Viacom failed to succeed and in its place, the search giant, Google Inc. bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. YouTube on the other hand, has stated, that its operations are covered under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that was designed keeping mind the legal obligations and lawsuits, digital media sharing websites might face from companies such as the likes of Viacom. With the DMCA enacted, services like YouTube were given an open platform, through which they could reach out to users with videos and other digital content, but at the same, was instructed to remove any copyrighted material, once identified.

It has also been revealed that, Viacom had been instructing its employees to secretly upload content, that was already copyrighted by Viacom to YouTube and deliberately added effects to the vides, that gave them the appearance of being stolen.

Via YouTube Blog & Reddit