December 2006- Viacom reportedly walks away from negotiations with NBC Universal, CBS Corp., and Fox Interactive about creating a TV-centric YouTube competitor site.
February 2007- Viacom retracts its content agreement with Google, pulls everything off the site.
February 2007- YouTube's pending content deal with CBS halts.
March 2007- Viacom Sues Google for over 63,000 separate counts of copyright infringement seeking $1 billion in damages. YouTube protects itself with the "Safe Harbor" provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
March 2007- Viacom General Counsel Michael Fricklas in a Washington Post op-ed says that YouTube was not just a passive content host, and that it is fully aware of what it does. "If the public knows what's there, then YouTube's management surely does. YouTube's own terms of use give it clear rights, notably the right to take anything down."
May 2007- Google signs YouTube content deal with record label EMI.
May 2007- British Premier League files class action suit against YouTube for copyright infringement, says Google "knowingly misappropriated and exploited this valuable property," when it allowed users to post footage from its football games.
June 2007- YouTube introduces Content ID to help content owners identify if their content is being used, gives them the option to remove unauthorized content, or monetize it.
July 2007- Google CEO Eric Schmidt says Viacom was "built from lawsuits."
August 2007- Google asks Comedy Central personalities Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to testify against Viacom in copyright hearings. Comedy Central is a Viacom property.
October 2007- Viacom joins MySpace, Microsoft, Veoh, and Dailymotion in signing the "Copyright Principles for User Generated Content Services," hoping it will become a sort of "television code" of online copyright protection.
March 2008- Viacom President and CEO Phillippe Dauman says "We've already achieved a number of things with this lawsuit. It took a long time, but because of our actions, YouTube has moved in the right direction. They're where they should have been all along."
May 2008- Google claims Viacom's suit threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression," claims it could have a chilling effect on all Internet communications.
June 2008- New York District Court rules that Google has to turn over user IDs and IP addresses to Viacom. Angry users upload nearly 5,000 "Viacom Sucks" videos to YouTube. Google is later allowed to make this data anonymous.
July 2008- Movie studio Lionsgate partners with YouTube for a branded channel with ad-supported official content from the studio.
October 2008- The McCain/Palin presidential campaign asked YouTube to stop taking down campaign videos that incorporated clips of news broadcasts. YouTube said that it was doing so at the request of broadcasters who objected to the use of their copyrighted footage.
April 2009- Content owners discus "TV Anywhere" plan to tie Web-based video content into cable subscription fees. Viacom CEO Dauman says, "People are used to paying for video subscriptions," sees it as a good idea.
June 2009- "TV Everywhere" network scheme launches.
July 2009- Some claims from the Premier League's 2007 suit against YouTube are dismissed, but claims for "statutory damages for works not registered in the US" are allowed.
September 2009- Google gives individual copyright holders access to the Insight metrics of YouTube videos that contain their intellectual property according to Content ID.
October 2009- Viacom presents "smoking gun" evidence for its case: internal e-mails from YouTube staff that show "actual knowledge" that copyright infringement was taking place on the video sharing site.
November 2009- Google announces YouTube Direct, a system where media outlets can directly communicate with users and arrange rebroadcasting rights on a one-to-one basis.
March 2010- Some of Viacom's "smoking gun" documents go public, company claims "YouTube was intentionally built on infringement."