Viacom lashed out  today and filed a 1 billion dollar lawsuit against Google for copyright infringement at GooTube (google.com and youtube.com) for distributing over 160,000 Viacom properties (MTV, Comedy Central).  This is not good.

On paper you can understand why Viacom has a reason for being upset about GooTube displaying their videos and profiting from them.  They invested a lot of time and money putting their productions together and to have someone benefit from them without permission is wrong.

On the other hand, Viacom benefitted from having their shows on GooTube.  Their videos were watched billions of times from people all over the world.  That's a lot of eyeballs watching your stuff.  How many fans of their shows were created from someone sending their buddy a clip from the Daily Show or South Park?  How many more albums were sold when somone sent a friend the new Charles Barkley video?  I doubt any real metrics exist to make a case out of this, but i'm sure it exists.

This is going to be interesting to watch.  Hopefully some "behind closed doors" meetings occur between the 2 companies and they can put aside their differences and realize that everyone can benefit from them working together.