With opening briefs in the 3-year-long $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom against Google’s YouTube being made public on Thursday, YouTube seized the opportunity to post a piece by its chief counsel, accusing Viacom of stealthily uploading its content “for years,” and trying its best to make it look pirated.

In response to the Google allegations, Viacom, which has not denied the charges, has termed them a deviation from the lawsuit; adding that YouTube’s founders thought their site required “steal” content for seeing the site prosper.

In case YouTube’s charge is correct, it is rather strange that the Viacom has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube – more so as the YouTube revelation implies that Viacom has actually undercut its own arguments.

Incidentally, the arguments bring to light Viacom’s duplicity – that of attempting to reach out to the Google-acquired start-up’s youthful audience on one hand; and, at the same time, also initiating a legal action that start-up.

Meanwhile, noting that the lawsuit might affect YouTube’s implicit protection under the safe-harbor stipulations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Fred von Lohmann - senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a backer of tech firms and Internet users – said: “I think that's the key question. At the heart of the case is what the court considers red-flag knowledge... and whether the kind of knowledge that YouTube had falls within that definition.”