Apparently, Viacom wasn't too thrilled about video clips from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report being freely viewable on YouTube for months. After asking YouTube to pull the content last October, the media company has now resorted to legal action and sued Google for a cool $1 billion in damages. As CNet reports, Viacom says nearly 160,000 video clips from its programming have been up on YouTube, and that the clips were viewed more than 1.5 billion times. Aside from the aforementioned shows, Viacom programming includes Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks movies as well as TV channels like Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, and Spike TV.

Google downplayed the legal challenge and extolled the benefits to content creators that it sees in YouTube. "We have not received the lawsuit but are confident that YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders and believe the courts will agree," Google said in a statement. "YouTube is great for users and offers real opportunities to rights holders: the opportunity to interact with users; to promote their content to a young and growing audience; and to tap into the online-advertising market. We will certainly not let this suit become a distraction to the continuing growth and strong performance of YouTube and its ability to attract more users (and) more traffic, and (to) build a stronger community."

Heh. I remember when Mark Cuban said if Google bought YouTube they'd start getting sued for billions of dollars. Looks like no one can resist the siren's call of litigation money.