Whilst much of Hollywood settles into the idea of webertainment as the inevitable medium of the near future, hostilities are still raging on the legal front.
Viacom is far from agreeing to settle the US$ 1 billion dollar copyright suit that this week got a boost from a judge in New York who ordered Google to turn over the IP addresses of alleged copyright infringers, their YouTube user-names, the videos they watched, and when they were screened.Viacom, which is the parent company of Paramount Studios and MTV, claims that the data is part of legal discovery it is entitled in order to prosecute its lawsuit.
The media conglomerate filed the massive lawsuit against Google and YouTube alleging that the websites virtually colluded with copyright-crunching web video pirates by not taking a more active role in inhibiting the trafficking of 160,000+ unauthorised clips of Viacom programming, supposedly viewed more than 1.5 billion times.
Google has since put in place audio fingerprinting technology as well as copyright identification software of its own contrivance that enables content owners to more readily police the billion video per month site.
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