Only if copyright holders voluntarily upload their content in a complete crazy manor. Otherwise the argument doesn't work since uh the copyright holder can easily identify which uploads were infringing.
> The only interesting thing here is that Google - all the way up to Sergei Brin - knew they were in the wrong. They knew it was piracy and yet chose to roll with it, because money. And the emails prove it.
Lawsuit is public record, feel free to link to those emails.
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Also from reading the lawsuit, Google removed the content in question.
To quote the case.
> [1] This case concerns the alleged infringement of a closed universe of videos posted on YouTube at various times between 2005 and 2008. As this Court explained, “only the current clips-in-suit are at issue in this litigation.” SPA54. All those clips were removed from YouTube years ago. SPA45 n.7. Viacom originally claimed that hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos infringed its copyrights, but ultimately identified approximately 63,000 clips-in-suit. JAXIII:3135(¶¶6-7). It turned out, however, that Viacom’s own employees and agents had actually uploaded many of those clips. JAIX:2213-14(¶¶150-152); JAXIII:3135-36(¶¶8-11); JAXXII:5745-46(¶¶1.63); JAXXIII:5973-75. Even when it realized that fact (after years of litigation), Viacom and its lawyers still were unable to identify all the clips-in-suit that Viacom was responsible for posting. JAXXII:5717-20(¶127), 5544-46(¶11). Many clips-in-suit, moreover, are identical to or indistinguishable from promotional clips that Viacom now acknowledges uploading.
The non-court filings are way more accusatory but should really stick the court filings for matters of fact.
> [2] It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom.
> [2] Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.
[1]: pg 15 https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4135344/143/viacom-inte...
[2]: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/broadcast-yourself/