There is a court battle taking place right now between two giants, Viacom and YouTube. Viacom is suing YouTube for actively hosting copyrighted material and for doing so, Viacom wants 1 billion dollars.
According to Consumerist.com, YouTube has posted up an astonishing accusation that, if true, could be devastating to the credibility and the foundation of Viacom’s case.
They write “Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko"s to upload clips from computers that couldn"t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users... In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.”
If the following statements are true, it’s damning evidence that Viacom is a shady jealous company. Yahoo.com reported that Viacom actually wanted to purchase YouTube but Google won with its final bid of 1.76 billion dollars. After the loss, Viacom started its attack against YouTube and the resulting lawsuit is the fruit of that labor.