WSJ Law Blog: “Google, Viacom Don’t Hold Back in Dueling Motions“:

We find pretty amusing this notion that a bunch of Viacom employees secretly uploaded hordes of their own copyrighted videos to YouTube in order to bolster their copyright lawsuit against YouTube’s parent company, Google.
We have no idea if it’s true, of course, but the allegation is out there, as of Thursday.
In dueling summary-judgment motions unveiled Thursday in the long-running, heated battle between Google and YouTube, some new intriguing allegations were revealed. Among them, that Viacom that Google’s YouTube unit had sought to exploit copyrighted works for profit, and, yes, that Viacom itself had secretly uploaded copyrighted clips it later demanded Youtube remove.

Ed note: In and of itself, a copyright owner may upload some of its own copyrighted content to a site not for sinister reasons but to test how easy it is to post such content, and to test the website’s response to a complaint. We don’t know what the circumstances were here, with certainty.