Viacom ramped up its offensive against Google yesterday, saying that it would not back down from its $1 billion lawsuit against the internet search engine.

Philippe Dauman, Viacom's chief executive, said that Google had not done enough to prevent content from being illegally uploaded to YouTube, and gave no impression that a settlement was near to being reached.

Viacom, the entertaiment company which owns MTV and Nickelodeon, claims that Google allowed more than 160,000 clips of its programming to be uploaded to YouTube, the video-sharing website it owns.

Google denies that is infringeing Viacom's copyright, and claims that it removes unauthorised videos from YouTube when asked to by content owners.

Speaking at an internet conference in San Francisco, Mr Dauman said that he had "an open mind" about reaching an agreement with Google, which he described as a "responsible company", but that a settlement "wasn't quite there yet".

Referring to Google's proposed solution to the problem, a filtering system which allows new content being uploaded to be checked against a database of copyright material, he said: "They have a lot of tools, but they're not perfect. What no-one wants is a proprietary system that benefits one company to the exclusion of others."

Mr Dauman said that what he would prefer would be an industry standard system, adding that it was "beyond the capacity of a company like ours, let alone smaller ones", to cope with a range of filtering technologies.

Earlier in the day Viacom and a range of other content producers, including Disney, CBS, Fox and NBC, as well as internet companies such as Microsoft and MySpace, announced that they would collaborate on a technology which would prevent users from uploading unauthorised material.

Google was not a party to the list, although analysts said it was not feasible that it continue to use its own technology while the rest of the internet and content industries were working to a common standard.

There was "a developing consensus among content creators and distributors" that whilst it was important content be widely available via the internet, there needed to be "rules of the road", Mr Dauman told an assembled audience at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

The complaint of media companies such as Viacom is that they should bear part of the onus - and cost - of policing sites such as YouTube, onto which vast amounts of content are uploaded each day, for unauthorised content.

Google argues that it complies with the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and takes down copyright-infringeing material when requested to do so by the copyright owner.

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