LOS ANGELES, March 13 (Xinhua) -- U.S. entertainment giant Viacom sued Google and its subsidiary video sharing website YouTube Tuesday for copyright infringement on "a massive scale," seeking more than one billion dollars from the Silicon Valley company.

The suit, which was filed in New York on Tuesday morning, alleges that YouTube has posted on its site more than 160,000 unauthorized clips of movies and TV shows from Viacom's cable networks. It also sought an injunction barring Google and YouTube from further copyright infringement.

Google purchased the popular YouTube in November for 1.7 billion dollars and began negotiating with Viacom and other entertainment giants for the right to carry their content on YouTube.

But the talks broke down in part because Google declined to putfilters in place that would have flagged copyrighted content.

Viacom, which is based in New York, said that YouTube failed to take "reasonable precautions" to halt the rampant infringement on its site, which was created for people to share their amateur videos but quickly became known for Hollywood programming.

"YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others' creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google," said a Viacom statement.

"Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and in obvious conflict with copyright laws," it said.

Google Tuesday issued a statement in response to the lawsuit, saying its YouTube site has respected the legal rights of copyright holders and provided them opportunities to interact with users and promote their content.

Major entertainment companies in the United States and Japan have initiated legal processes against Google and YouTube under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a U.S. law the governs uses of digital content, but Viacom's suit is the first suit filed by a company of a similar size as Google.

Viacom reported annual profits of 1.6 billion dollars on revenues of 11.5 billion dollars last year, while Google reported profits of 3 billion dollars on revenues of 10.6 billion dollars.