The last-week-unsealed court filings in the biggest-ever copyright infringement lawsuit – between Viacom and YouTube, for $1 billion – reveal that both Viacom and Google have been involved in some reprehensible acts in the past.

Viacom, which filed the copyright lawsuit against Google’s YouTube three years back, has – according to the emails filed with the briefs that have lately been publicly released – alleged that, in its early days, the 2005-founded and later Google-acquired YouTube was involved in a lot of perceptive ‘unlawful’ exploitation of copyrighted works.

However, in its defense, YouTube claims that while Viacom has been crying hoarse about the “illegal” availability of its content - like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show – on YouTube, the company itself was secretly sending its employees to offsite locations, like Kinko's, for uploading copies of the shows to YouTube.

Despite the fact that YouTube was apparently ‘willfully’ blind to Viacom’s infringement practices, its argument holds ground as it clearly undercuts Viacom’s accusations of copyright infringement against YouTube.

With both Viacom and YouTube hurling accusations at each other to prove their point, a court ruling in favor of YouTube will end the case; while one in favor of Viacom will have the company either seek actual damages and profits Google/YouTube made from the infringed works, or statutory damages for each ‘infringed’ copyright work!