Yahoo Finance reports today that Viacom has sued Youtube for copyright infringement and is seeking “more than $1 billion in damages” for an alleged “60,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom’s programming have been available on YouTube and…viewed more than 1.5 billion times.” Viacom released the following statement in conjunction with the lawsuit:

“YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others’ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google. Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws. In fact, YouTube’s strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site, thus generating significant traffic and revenues for itself while shifting the entire burden - and high cost - of monitoring YouTube onto the victims of its infringement.

This behavior stands in stark contrast to the actions of other significant distributors, who have recognized the fair value of entertainment content and have concluded agreements to make content legally available to their customers around the world.

There is no question that YouTube and Google are continuing to take the fruit of our efforts without permission and destroying enormous value in the process. This is value that rightfully belongs to the writers, directors and talent who create it and companies like Viacom that have invested to make possible this innovation and creativity.

After a great deal of unproductive negotiation, and remedial efforts by ourselves and other copyright holders, YouTube continues in its unlawful business model. Therefore, we must turn to the courts to prevent Google and YouTube from continuing to steal value from artists and to obtain compensation for the significant damage they have caused.”

Maybe if Viacom wants me to watch music videos on MTV, they should actually play some once in a while, right? To make matters worse, this lawsuit comes right on the heels of Internet radio getting slapped with prohibitive new royalty rates that may effectively shut many such stations down.

It’s a typically stupid move on Viacom’s part, attempting to shut down innovative competition rather than innovate themselves. The days of TV and radio stations dictating content is over (check their memos—TRL is dead). Viewers aren’t willing to wade through hours of crap to watch a 3 minute video when they know they can watch just that clip whenever they want online. If they had any sense, mtv.com would be what Youtube is now: a massive searchable archive of all their content, with ads around the edges to generate revenue.