While they obviously have a bias, they raise an interesting point in that if Viacom itself cannot agree internally about whether a use is authorized, in that some of the clips they’re suing over were posted by their own employees, then how can YouTube be expected to divine the proper state of authorization?
My guess would be that Viacom is asking for a strict opt-in regime, i.e. whenever any of their content is uploaded, Viacom’s legal department has to sign off before it goes live, even if it was uploaded by their own marketing department.

YouTube also alleges that Viacom felt the need to upload their own videos surreptitiously, and sometimes “roughed” them up to seem…less official? more unauthorized? It’s an interesting question of motives here, and I don’t think it’s about sneakily priming the pump for litigation, i.e. making sure there would be some clips they could claim were infringing. That’s an unnecessarily risky gamble, because it’s not as if no one was uploading Viacom content otherwise; there should have been ample evidence of infringement. Why else would Viacom be doing this, and what would the different potential motives mean for the practicality of filtering those uploads?

Viacom isn’t the only company with infringers uploading their material to Youtube. What’s to stop other mid- and large-scale copyright holders from demanding the same kind of system? You’d barely be able to use mainstream cultural material in anything you created on Youtube.

And no, I don’t think we have any right to the information about the case until after it is resolved. Releasing the kind of sensative private information used in these cases would open Google or any party up to a potential firestorm of complaints and liability suits.

I’m thinking this has a lot to do with the ongoing battle between media corporations like Viacom and Google – particularly because of Google’s search sites (google.com itself and YouTube) being common portals and aggregators of media/news/etc. It seems more likely that Viacom is working to take Google down a peg because of how much power and influence it has. Whether you believe Google is good or evil, that kind of information release would be quite damaging.