The English Premier League is suing YouTube, the video-sharing website, for alleged copyright infringement.

The league said that the site, which is owned by Google, was engaged in a "deliberate strategy" of "promoting and encouraging massive copyright infringement" by enabling excerpts of games to be posted.

YouTube already faces a $1 billion (£500 million) lawsuit from Viacom, the entertainment company, which accuses the site of uploading approximately 160,000 unauthorised clips from television shows.

Both claims are denied by YouTube's lawyers.

In documents filed with a court in New York, the Premier League accused YouTube of having "knowingly misappropriated" the footage of games "without payment of license to the owners of the intellectual property".

The league said it had been deprived of revenues associated with its matches, which were seen by an estimated audience of 2.59 billion people in 204 countries.

Footage from at least sixteen matches had appeared on the site, the document claims, including, most recently, from the Arsenal v Fulham game on April 29.

The league claims: "The Defendants have adopted a cynical and self-contradictory strategy designed to perpetuate the lawful exploitation of valuable property rights." The documentation added that they were "fully aware" that their business model "violates laws protecting the copyright content that they have misappropriated".

A search for "premier league football" on YouTube today threw up 917 results, including footage of recent Arsenal games and several 'greatest goal' collections.

In a statement, Google said that the lawsuit "threatens the way people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression over the internet".

"Most content owners understand that we respect copyrights, we work every day to help them manage their content, and we are developing state-of-the-art tools to let them do that even better," Kent Walker, general counsel at Google, said.

Google's defence relies on so-called "safe harbours" in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 which protects content-hosting sites such as YouTube and Craigslist so long as they take down copyright-infringing material when a copyright owner requests.

A spokesman for YouTube said that it worked actively with content owners to take down unauthorised material and provided them with tools that "can prevent the reloading of copies of the same video clip after it has been removed from the service".

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