Fresh off the you-saw-this-one-coming desk: Viacom -- parent company of MTV Networks and other pretty teenager factories -- went ahead and served YouTube's parent company Google with a lawsuit for copyright infringement today.
The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is seeking $1 billion.
Viacom released a statement today outlining its motives: "[YouTube's] 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."
Google purchased YouTube for $1.7 billion last year and was almost immediately expected to run into copyright infringement cases thanks to its deep pockets. CNN reports that the company currently has $11 billion in cash on its balance sheet. But where other media owners, such as NBC Universal formed partnerships to host their content on YouTube, negotiations between the site and Viacom struggled from the start.
YouTube streams an estimated 100 million videos per day.
