Viacom has filed a lawsuit against Google for more than $1bn over unlicensed video clips on the YouTube video sharing service. 

Viacom, which owns MTV, Comedy Central, Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks, accused YouTube and its parent 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 unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws."

Viacom had previously complained about the widespread copyright abuse on the video service, demanding the removal of 100,000 videos from YouTube.  

The media giant now claims 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 policy on copyrighted materials. The site will normally remove copyrighted content only at the request of the copyright holder.  

Google purchased YouTube for $1.65bn in November and has signed content licensing agreements with several major studios. 

The company claims to be developing filters to recognise copyrighted content, but pirated video clips remain easy to find on YouTube.

Google did not respond to a request for comment from vnunet.com.