Viacom Sues YouTube

But with the enormous volume of clips uploaded daily to YouTube's increasingly popular service, content owners have been growing frustrated with policy that puts the onus of notifying Google on them.

Following Google's October 2006 purchase of YouTube, many industry commentators had predicted that the search giant was placing itself squarely in the sights of aggrieved media companies. In the immediate aftermath, however, the lawsuits failed to materialize. Media giant CBS(CBS) even claimed that posting clips from its TV shows on YouTube had increased the viewers of its televised content.

Viacom, after asking Google to initially remove its content, reneged on its request and began negotiating with the search giant in an attempt to find a partnership. But Viacom had a change of heart at the beginning of February, when negotiations broke down, and told Google to take down about 100,000 of its clips from YouTube's site.

About two weeks later, Viacom announced that it had reached an agreement with Joost, a rival video-sharing service, to distribute its content and would look for distribution deals with other services as well.

Also on Tuesday, General Electric's(GE) NBC -- which also has had disputes with Google in the past -- announced a deal with vMix, another video-sharing service.

Shares of Google were recently off $4.20, or 0.9% to $450.55. Viacom was up 35 cents, or 0.9%, to $39.90.

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