Premier League sues YouTube in copyright row

The Premier League has sued YouTube, saying the video-sharing website was engaging in massive copyright infringement by showing footage of games.

The top division of English soccer, broadcast in 204 countries worldwide and viewed by an estimated audience of 2.59 billion, is taking out a joint lawsuit with Bourne, which calls itself one of the leading independent publishers of music in the US.

The action filed in US District Court in Manhattan, seeks class-action status and asks for a disgorgement of profits made by the alleged actions, as well as unspecified damages.

Named as defendants were YouTube Inc, YouTube LLC and YouTube’s corporate parent, Google.

The lawsuit said a scheme by which website visitors could access, view, and otherwise exploit copyrighted materials without having to pay their owners made the site valuable enough for Google to pay $1.65bn (€1.2bn) to buy YouTube in November.

In a statement, Google general counsel Kent Walker defended the site, saying: “These suits simply misunderstand the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which balances the rights of copyright holders against the need to protect internet communications and content.

“They threaten the way people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment, and political and artistic expression over the internet.”

The lawsuit is not the first to challenge YouTube’s business model.

Earlier this year, media conglomerate Viacom sued YouTube for $1bn (€736m) in federal court in New York, claiming that the site had built a business by using the internet to “wilfully infringe copyrights on a huge scale”.

Viacom’s was the first lawsuit filed by a major media owner.

Several media companies have reached agreements to supply YouTube with clips, including CBS, General Electric’s NBC Universal and the BBC, but many others remain reluctant to deal with the site because of copyright concerns.