TV empire seeking more than $1bn over alleged copyright violations.
Viacom has filed a lasuit against Google for more than US$1bn (AUD$1.28bn) over unlicensed video clips on the YouTube video sharing service.
Viacom, which holdings include MTV, Comedy Central, Paramount Pictures, and Dreamworks, accused YouTube and Google of knowingly and purposely allowing pirated content to be distributed.
"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," the company said.
"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."
Viacom has previously complained about the widespread copyright abuse on the video service. Last month the firm demanded that 100,000 videos be taken down. The media giant now says that YouTube has served more than 1.5 billion page views of Viacom movies and TV shows.
YouTube has been under fire from film and TV studios since early 2006 over its policies on copyrighted materials. The site will normally only remove copyrighted content at the request of the copyright holder.
Last November, Google purchased YouTube for US$1.65bn. Since then, the search giant has signed content licensing agreements with several major studios and is currently developing filters to recognize copyrighted content. However, pirated video clips remain easy to find on YouTube.
Google did not respond to a request for comment.