Defendant
1 case as defendant.
Company overview. YouTube, Inc. (also organized as YouTube, LLC) is the American online video platform founded in February 2005 by former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. It is headquartered in San Bruno, California, and has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Google LLC since Google acquired it in October 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock; Google LLC is itself a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL/GOOG). YouTube does not report standalone headcount, but its parent Alphabet is one of the world's largest companies by revenue and market capitalization. Alphabet's 2024 10-K reported YouTube advertising revenue of roughly $36.1 billion for the year.
Products / services / operations. YouTube operates the world's largest user-generated video-sharing platform, where users upload, watch, share, and livestream video across mobile, web, and TV. Major offerings include the free ad-supported platform and YouTube Shorts, plus subscription products YouTube Premium, YouTube Music, YouTube TV (a live-TV streaming service), and YouTube Kids. It also monetizes through YouTube Ads and its creator-partner program.
Patent-litigation posture. YouTube is an operating company, not a patent assertion entity. In the tracked case data it appears only once, purely as a defendant (1 case, 0 as plaintiff) — the pattern of a product company defending against an infringement suit. The single tracked case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas (Waco Division), a venue known for patent litigation before Judge Alan Albright.
Notable cases or context. The tracked matter is WAG Acquisition, L.L.C. v. Google LLC et al. (No. 6:21-cv-00816, filed August 6, 2021), in which WAG Acquisition — a non-practicing entity that has filed similar streaming-patent suits against Amazon, Netflix, Disney/Hulu, and others — accused YouTube's streaming services of infringing media-streaming patents (including U.S. Patent Nos. 7,747,824 and 7,636,594). Google and co-defendants challenged the patents in PTAB inter partes reviews; in March 2026 the Federal Circuit affirmed PTAB decisions invalidating claims across the asserted streaming patents, resolving the underlying dispute in the defendants' favor.
WAG sued Google and YouTube in W.D. Tex. asserting three streaming-media patents. The case was stayed pending IPR; after the PTAB invalidated the asserted claims and the Federal Circuit affirmed, it resolved in Google's favor.