Google, the U.S. web search giant, faces a W30 million (US$1=W945) lawsuit in Korea. Humor University, a local humor website, announced on Sunday that it filed a suit against Google demanding W20 million in payments and W10 million in damages. Humor University said the American firm allegedly failed to pay for three months of online ads.

Humor University said that it signed an agreement to host Google's Adsense ads and ran them for three months in late 2005, but Google refused to pay, citing click fraud. Humor University said Google never provided evidence to back up those claims.

Google was just last week slapped with a US$1 billion suit by American media conglomerate Viacom for copyright infringement. Viacom, the corporate parent of Paramount Pictures movie studio, accused Google's YouTube service of displaying without permission 160,000 video clips that belong to Viacom's companies, MTV and Comedy Central.

(englishnews@chosun.com )