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The legal department at Google HQ must be both big and busy. This week, Viacom - the conglomerate which owns MTV and Paramount Pictures among other things - launched a $US1 billion copyright lawsuit against Google and its subsidiary YouTube.
For the benefit of those who are not cyber-savvy, YouTube is a video-sharing website that allows its users to upload (which means put online) video clips. The site, barely two years old, and acquired by Google last October, was invented to host original content generated by its users - cyberage home movies, in other words. But TV and music clips, and excerpts from television shows soon showed up; whole TV shows and movies soon followed.
The thicket of copyright issues that has grown up around YouTube has now become thorny. Google has negotiated deals with many companies, including CBS and the BBC but negotations with Viacom have broken down.
But that is just the beginning of Google's problems. It is facing literally dozens of patent and copyright lawsuits, not least as a result of the material it posts on Google News, which is essentially lifted, without fee, from various news services.
These Google wars do not mark the first time that copyright law has had to wrestle with the problems posed by the internet's facility for copying and pasting content. But it looks likely to be the biggest yet. We all need to watch with interest, since the outcome will have a profound effect on the shape of the cultural landscape in the 21st century.
