YouTube owner Google Inc. said that Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against the company is a threat to Internet communications. Viacom basically alleges that Google is not doing enough to prevent copyrighted clips from showing up on the leading video sharing website because it reaps profits of them.

Google has countered those accusations in papers filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. The search engine leader has pointed out that it does a lot more than it is legally bound to in order to prevent unauthorized copyrighted videos from being shared on YouTube. The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects companies as long as they take down in a timely manner copyrighted content once they are notified by the copyright owner. YouTube has implemented video filtering technology which enables immediate detection of most copyrighted clips.

Viacom's lawsuit was initially filed last year, but was refiled in a modified form last month. According to Viacom, Google should get more involved in finding ways to stop users from uploading copyrighted materials, seeing that at this point YouTube’s only measure for this problem enables owners to complain about a certain post and block it from being viewed.

So far, Viacom has records of more than 150,000 unauthorized clips uploaded on the popular web site, among which several shows from MTV, Comedy Central and also other network broadcasts like "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "South Park."

However, Google expressed its concern that such a lawsuit could be considered a direct threat to freedom on the internet. Google’s lawyers are very confident about the defense they managed to build and are ready to take it all the way to the Supreme Court.