Viacom is suing YouTube and its parent company, Google, for copyright infringement over the unauthorized posting of Viacom-owned videos to the video sharing Web site. In the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Viacom alleges that almost 160,000 of its videos have been uploaded to YouTube without permission and have been viewed over 1.5 billion times. The company is seeking $1 billion in damages and an injunction to bar Google from further infringement, according to Reuters.

The lawsuit follows a Digital Millennium Copyright Act request that Viacom sent to Google last month regarding the unauthorized posting of videos. At the time, Viacom demanded that Google remove over 100,000 of its clips from the Web site, and Google said it would comply with the request. However, Viacom says it decided to sue Google after negotiations and other measures were unproductive.

"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," Viacom said in a statement. "YouTube's strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site. 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."