• Reuters, Monday, May 7, 2007 12 PM

The English Premier League, the most prominent and powerful league in world soccer, headed a list of plaintiffs that filed suit against Google's YouTube on Friday for copyright infringement. Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the EPL and music publisher Bourne Co. jointly sued the online video provider, charging YouTube with deliberately making money from its copyrights by encouraging massive infringement on its Web site to generate traffic.

Once again, Google, which is also being sued for copyright infringement by global media giant Viacom, is using the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 as the cornerstone of its defense. In a statement, Google general counsel Kent Walker replied that the suits "threaten the way people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment, and political and artistic expression over the Internet."

The Premier League's lawyers said YouTube's tool for removing copyrighted materials simply isn't good enough for a company with the technological resources of Google. "The Premier League has been forced to send time-consuming and ineffectual notices of infringement to YouTube," the lawsuit said.

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