Viacom, owner of the MTV channel, has finally sued Google for more than $1 billion (£520 million) after months of negotiations, claiming that the search engine’s YouTube video-sharing site amounts to a “massive intentional copyright infringement”.

The suit, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, also seeks an injunction preventing Google and YouTube from further copyright infringement.

Viacom, which also owns Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, claims that there are nearly 160,000 unauthorised clips of its programming on YouTube, which have been viewed about 1.5 billion times.

The daily satirical shows presented by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are among the most viewed programme clips.

Viacom, which forced YouTube to remove more than 100,000 clips last month, said that it had decided to sue because settlement talks had been “unproductive”. The company wants to be paid for the inclusion of its content on YouTube.

A Viacom spokesman said: “YouTube is a significant, for-profit organisation 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.”

“Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws. After a great deal of unproductive negotiation and remedial efforts YouTube continues in its unlawful business model. Therefore, we must turn to the courts to prevent Google and YouTube from continuing to steal value from artists and to obtain compensation for the significant damage they have caused.”

Copyright law compels YouTube to remove all content that it does not hold the rights to if it receives a complaint from the owner. YouTube regularly receives such requests from media companies and readily complies with them.

The suit represents the biggest confrontation to date between a major media company and YouTube, which Google bought in November for $1.7 billion.

Other media companies such as CBS and NBC Universal have also clashed with YouTube over copyright issues but have reached deals to license their material.

Universal Music Group, a unit of Vivendi, had threatened to sue YouTube, saying it was a hub for pirated music videos, but later reached a licensing deal with the company.

Viacom recently agreed a deal with Joost, a new “peer-to-peer” television company, to distribute the company’s television shows and channels online. Analysts said that agreement appeared to pave the way for yesterday’s lawsuit.

The move comes less than a week after Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, said media companies would have no choice but to put their television shows and films on video sites such as YouTube. “The growth of YouTube, the growth of online, is so fundamental that these companies are going to be forced to work with and in the Internet,” he said.

YouTube last year said it intended to introduce digital fingerprinting technology that could automatically identify copyrighted video and audio clips in order to remove them or share related advertising revenue with content owners.

In a statement, Google said that it believed the courts would agree that “YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders.”

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