Viacom CEO Dauman: Yep, We’re Still Suing Google
by Peter Kafka
Posted on March 18, 2009 at 2:10 PM PT
Viacom (VIA) CEO Philippe Dauman just spent more than an hour giving the most detail-free answers he could possibly deliver to BusinessWeek’s Ron Grover, who was interviewing him at an industry conference.
So no surprise that Dauman had little to say about his company’s giant, glacial lawsuit–two years and counting–against Google (GOOG) over copyright infringement at YouTube. But for the record, Dauman still thinks… something will happen, someday.
“We’re in U.S. litigation-land. We are in discovery. A lot of documents have been produced. One thing about technology, there’s so many more documents now,” Dauman noted, accurately. And so what does that mean? “We continue to be confident in our position. There’s not much more we can say, and there will be an outcome.”
So there you have it.
Dauman did say that his suit helped push Google to install a filtering system that susses out videos that shouldn’t be on the site (more on that soon). And he did say that his son, Philippe Jr., continues to enjoy working at Google–a hire that Dauman says both he and Google CEO Eric Schmidt signed off on. “He’s doing very well there. He loves it, it’s a great company.”
