Viacom (NYSE: VIA), as expected, doesn't feel it was dealt a knock-out blow when a June ruling dismissed its copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company Google (Nasdaq: GOOG). 
The media giant has picked itself off the mat, dusted itself off and filed an appeal in New York court trying to collect more than $1 billion in damages from Google.
It's not as if this is something new. The two have been wrangling--and airing dirty linen--in court for four years. Viacom claims that YouTube turned a blind eye to contributions on its site that ripped off copyrighted content from programs such as The Daily Show. YouTube maintained that it did its best to police the content but even Google, before it acquired YouTube and brought it into the mainstream of its Google TV experiment, called the service "a 'rogue enabler' of content theft."
The case is interesting in light of the new wave of authorized and unauthorized over-the-top content descending on computers and, recently, Internet-connected TVs which, according to another story, are going to be hot items this holiday season.
"Connected devices are the future of content consumption and entertainment in the living room as they capture the broader trends of integration among different silos in consumers' lives," according to Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst of Parks Associates, which predicted the holiday bonanza.
For more:
- see this story
- and this news release
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