Google's YouTube and Viacom resolved a copyright lawsuit seven years after it was filed.

The specific terms and conditions of the settlement were not disclosed.

In 2007, YouTube was sued by Viacom for $1 billion in damages in the U.S. District Court of Southern District of New York over video clips on the website. According to Viacom, the video website contained almost 160,000 unauthorized clips from Viacom's programming. Viacom noted the 160,000 accumulated more than 1.5 billion views. In addition, Viacom wanted an injunction of its programs from appearing on YouTube.

Viacom owns cable networks including Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, and VH1.

"YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others' creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google," wrote Viacom in a statement in March 2007. "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 alleged YouTube had made no steps in combatting infringed videos for the benefit of generating traffic and revenue. Viacom referred itself, and fellow companies and people with infringed videos, as "victims" of YouTube's lack of monitoring.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) stated a number of class action lawsuits were filed against YouTube, including sports league music publishers and other copyright owners, after Viacom's decision to go to court.

"These lawsuits will test the strength of the DMCA safe harbors as applied to online service providers that host text audio and video on behalf of users," noted the EFF. "The whole idea of the DMCA safe harbors was to provide legal protections for online service providers like YouTube who otherwise would hesitate to create the online platforms that have revolutionized creativity culture and commerce."

According to the EFF, the lawsuits against YouTube would prove important for fellow online services such as Amazon, Blogger, eBay, Flickr, and Scribd, to name a few.

The court battle between Viacom and Google's YouTube has gone back and forth in previous years, but the former filed an appeal in April 2013 after victories in YouTube's favor.

In a statement on March 18, the two parties settled.

"Google and Viacom today jointly announced the resolution of the Viacom vs. YouTube copyright litigation," Google and Viacom said in a joint statement. "This settlement reflects the growing collaborative dialogue between our two companies on important opportunities, and we look forward to working more closely together."

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