YouTube/Viacom lawsuit documents are out and in the wild
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Yesterday saw the unsealing of a huge mass of documents and filings relating to Viacom’s $1bn copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube. At issue is how aware YouTube’s executive team were of copyright infringement on the site, and what steps they took to prevent it.
Viacom’s submission includes evidence of emails between YouTube’s team in 2005 and 2006, which appear to show the site’s co-founders admitting that 80% of user traffic depended on infringing videos, and that some of these videos had even been uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim.
However, YouTube chief counsel Zahavah Levine has hit back with a blog post claiming that Viacom “continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, evven while publicly complaining about its presence there”. He also reiterates that Viacom tried to buy YouTube before it was acquired by Google.
