Viacom and others have filed a Complaint against YouTube and Google alleging vast copyright infringement and seeking more than $1 billion in damages and injunctive relief.  The Complaint contends that Viacom has identified at least 160,000 clips of its its programming on YouTube that it alleges have been viewed an astounding 1.5 billion times.  Viacom released this statement pertaining to the Complaint:

YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others’ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google.  Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws.  In fact, YouTube’s strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site, thus generating significant traffic and revenues for itself while shifting the entire burden – and high cost – of monitoring YouTube onto the victims of its infringement.

Viacom is clearly making its case that Google's actions constitute infringement per the Supreme Court's 2005 Decision in MGM v Grokster, which held that "one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties."  Key to the Grokster case was the fact that Grokster was profiting handsomely from the rampant infringement it was facilitating.  Sound like Viacom's press release?  Although not as blatant as Grokster (you can actually find lots of non-infringing material on YouTube), the economic benefits to Google from this widespread infringement are seemingly undeniable.