Highlights from Viacom vs. Google court docs (images)

Viacom and Google on Thursday made hundreds of pages of court documents public in their copyright dispute over YouTube. We've excerpted some of the most interesting tidbits.

This is a snippet from an 86-page document made public Thursday that Viacom claims represents facts that Google does not dispute. A federal judge eventually will decide which are true and relevant to the copyright lawsuit.

On this page, Viacom is hoping to demonstrate that in the early days of YouTube--before it was bought by Google--the company's founders allowed copyright infringements. These e-mail excerpts come from the first half of 2005, a few months after YouTube was founded.

These excerpts are from what Viacom claims are undisputed facts, representing the company's effort to show that YouTube's founders allowed users to infringe others' copyrights.

Here's another excerpt showing what Viacom claims are undisputed facts.

Google also filed a series of briefs on Thursday, which say that Viacom complained about copyright infringements while secretly uploading videos, using fake e-mail addresses, and sending employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom.

Google says that Viacom included a list of allegedly infringing video clips in the current lawsuit for which -- whoops! -- Viacom actually had given permission to be uploaded.

Excerpts from Google e-mail messages in early 2006 appear in a Viacom brief made public on Thursday. Google bought YouTube for $1.7 billion in stock in October 2006.

In a conversation recounted in an excerpted e-mail message, Google co-founder Sergey Brin wondered whether allowing copyright infringements was "Googley?"

An excerpt from Google's brief filed Thursday. The lawsuit began in March 2007 and seeks over $1 billion in damages

Another excerpt from a document that Google filed Thursday.

E-mail messages and instant messaging logs--did neither Google nor YouTube have a routine document destruction policy?--show that YouTube managers knew that copyright infringement was happening, Viacom claims.

CNET reported in November 2006 that in the YouTube purchase, "12.5 percent of the equity issued and issuable in the transaction will be subject to escrow for one year to secure certain indemnification obligations." The Viacom lawsuit was filed five months later.

"Plaintiffs' widespread use of YouTube to market and promote their content--uses that continued even in the midst of this litigation--defeats any notion that the presence of their material on YouTube creates a fact or circumstance from which infringing activity is apparent," a Google brief made public Thursday says.

Disclosure: The author of the captions is married to a Google employee who is not involved with YouTube.