Viacom is suing Google over the use of unauthorized Viacom content on YouTube, which Google recently purchased. Mark Cuban, among others, predicted massive lawsuits over YouTube's copyright violations once Google's bank accounts became involved.

In other recent Google legal news, Google lost a case in Belgium which claimed that Google News violated newspaper's copyrights. However, Google won a case in which the U.S. court found that Google's choice of ads to display constituted protected speech and that Google could therefore choose not to run certain ads.

Incidentally, some of the Slashdot comments on Google cases were like these:

"Maybe Google should just delink the sites altogether, that way the offended media organizations can watch their traffic plummet to zero?"

"Well if they want to be assholes about it, why not just drop them off of the database completely? It seems to me that Google is in a good position now to offer a deal to sites; they can either agree to be crawled, and thus end up in a cache for 30 days or whatever, or they can just not end up in the index at all. Their option."

"If I'm Google, I turn the morons off and see how fast they come screaming back when their ad revenue plummets. Seriously, IT'S FREE FREAKING ADVERTISING. Google should be charging *them*."

"Google ought to just pull-out from indexing anyone who complains about their methods. You effectively disappear off of the Internet w/o Google, and these whiny complainers deserve exactly that. Maybe after they've lived in a black hole for a while they'll realize the benefit of having their free material easy for web users to find and view."

I find those attitudes scary. Google isn't always right, and they're not always going to be right. Substitute "Microsoft" or "the government" for "Google" and those comments are eerie. Google is on track to be more of a monopoly than Microsoft.