Premier Silvio Berlusconi's private TV network company Mediaset has filed a lawsuit against video-sharing website YouTube and parent company Google for ''illegal diffusion and commercial exploitation of audio-video files belonging to the group''.
Mediaset said a search of the YouTube site on June 10 revealed 4,643 audio-video files belonging to the company that could be watched online - the equivalent of over 325 hours of material.
Based on these statistics and the number of hits the files had received, Mediaset claimed that its three Italian television channels had lost the equivalent of 315,672 days of viewing by television audiences.
Mediaset is asking for 500 million euros in consequential damages, plus compensation for ''losses from the lack of publicity slot sales on the programmes illegally broadcast on the web''.
