Google Seeks a Spark

It's been another event-packed quarter for Google(GOOG Quote), but investors looking at the company's stock price wouldn't know it.

Shares closed at $476.01 on Wednesday, one day ahead of the company's first-quarter earnings report to be announced after Thursday's closing bell. That's not very far from the $481.75 level it saw at the end of the first trading day of the year.

But despite its static stock price, the company has seen huge developments over that timeframe:

For starters, Google saw media giant Viacom(VIA Quote) file a lawsuit for $1 billion against it. In the suit, filed in March, Viacom alleges that Google's YouTube video-sharing service violated its copyright protections by allowing users to post clips from popular Viacom-owned TV shows, like South Park, to its site.

The lawsuit followed failed negotiations on a revenue-sharing agreement between the two companies. When the deal fell apart, Viacom ordered Google to remove all Viacom content from YouTube. But many reports have shown that YouTube continued to post impressive gains even after the Viacom content had been taken down.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, meanwhile, dismissed Viacom's lawsuit as a negotiating ploy in an April interview with Wired. And just Tuesday, Schmidt told a conference in San Francisco that YouTube was working to introduce an automated video-filtering service that would make copyright violation claims moot.

For Jim Cramer's take on the company discussed in this article, please click here for his Wall St. Confidential video.

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