YouTube Getting Sued was Always a Matter of When, not If...

...now it's a matter of how many different companies sue them and for how much, since Viacom (owner of MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, etc.) dropped a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit on them today:

In the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, Viacom says YouTube "harnessed technology to willfully infringe copyrights on a huge scale" and had "brazen disregard" of intellectual property laws.

Best of all, they didn't forget to take a jab at Google's motto:

"Finding a way of peaceful coexistence is quite a struggle," [intellectual property attorney Bruce] Sunstein said. "Google's motto is 'Don't be Evil,' and you could argue that with YouTube that motto is wearing a little thin."

Link to AP story on Yahoo! News

Viacom drinks the Joost

Viacom announced plans to deliver Paramount films and television shows on Joost, the advertising-funded, P2P-driven, TV-like service founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the duo behind Kazaa and Skype. Joost seems to have somehow calmed the angry media giant, which recently evacuated a torrential flood of takedown notices on YouTube.

In an latimes.com article (stuck behind a registerwall) a market researcher is quoted as saying, "The Joost platform is in essence a closed system. The ability for piracy and content to be stolen is minimal."

Surely it's obvious by now that any amount of weakness in any DRM scheme welcomes widespread compromise. So how did Joost manage to convince Viacom that its DRM would be effective enough to prevent widespread piracy? Are Zennström and Friis ultimately pulling a FairPlay on a colossus of the entertainment industry?

Further reading:
Joost - the new, new TV thing (via The Register)