United States entertainment giant Viacom on Tuesday launched a billion-dollar lawsuit against Google and its affiliate YouTube, accusing the video-sharing website of "massive" copyright infringement.

Viacom, whose empire includes MTV and Paramount Pictures, said YouTube had "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".

"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," the firm said in a statement.
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