Viacom brings the hate

Today Viacom brought a lawsuit against the popular Google property YouTube for $1 billion dollars in damages, citing that the website intentionally violated its copyright. The claim states that YouTube has hosted nearly 160,000 unauthorized clips of their programming.

I'll be writing more about this later as more facts become available, but in the meantime, here's a rundown of news items about the site:

CNET - Basic news item with other good links to previous stories

Bloomberg - Also mentions Mark Cuban's lawsuit against them and has some good quotes form Eric Schmidt

TVWeek.com - Decent back story on the Viacom takedown orders

TVOver - More excerpts from the Viacom statement

Personally I think Viacom is doing the whole iPhone/Cisco/Apple tactic of trying to get a stronger negotiation standpoint through filing a lawsuit. What do you think?