The head of Premier Silvio Berlusconi's private media corporation said on Friday that Mediaset was ''obliged'' to sue video-sharing internet site YouTube and its owner Google for copyright infringement.
''If an administrator believes his company has suffered damages he must take legal action because one day any shareholder could ask why no claim for damages was made,'' Mediaset Chairman Fedele Confalonieri said.
He added that Mediaset's action against YouTube was justified by both civil law and laws regarding intellectual property.
On July 30 Mediaset announced it was suing YouTube and parent company Google for 500 million euros for the unauthorized posting of 4,643 film clips which it said was equal to 325 hours of copyrighted material and cost the broadcaster 315,672 viewing days,
The 500-million-euro figure, Media added, did not include the group's losses from lost advertising revenues.
At the time YouTube/Google issued a statement saying that it ''respects copyright holders and takes copyright very seriously. There is no reason for legal action and all the associated costs''.
YouTube/Google added that it ''already prohibits all its users from uploading infringing material'' and cooperated ''with all copyright holders to identify and promptly remove infringing content as soon as we are officially notified''.
The action by Mediaset came some two weeks after Italian prosecutors accused Google of not monitoring its content when it posted on YouTube a video of an autistic student being tormented by fellow classmates.
Google/YouTube is also being sued by Mediaset's Spanish subsidiary Telecinco and the French broadcaster TF1 and is facing a $1 billion suit lodged by American entertainment giant Viacom.
Last month Mediaset said it was ready to negotiate an agreement with YouTube to resolve their dispute and that its 500-million-euro suit was designed to make a point on copyright laws and video sharing.
In a related development, Italian state broadcaster RAI this week signed an accord to make some of its substantial video archive available on YouTube.
