It seems that Google has accused publisher Viacom of uploading its own content to Google’s video service, YouTube, before suing the company for the fairly hefty sum of $1 billion for copyright infringement.

Broadcast yourself, and then sue, perhaps

It’s interesting stuff, especially given the fairly pronounced impact that cases as big as Viacom’s have had on YouTube’s ability to add content. Moreover, Reuters reports that Viacom has gone public with a number of emails sent back and forth between YouTube staff that give the impression that things aren’t quite as cut and dry as well they might have seemed. Indeed, it goes right to the top, with a message sent between YouTube’s co-founders Steve Chen and Jawed Karim simply reading,

“We’re going to have a tough time defending the fact that we’re not liable for copyrighted material on the site because we didn’t put it up when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it.”

Contrarywise, in a posting to the YouTube blog, the service has accused Viacom of something relatively similar, pointing out that, while the whole case was ongoing,

“For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publically complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately ‘roughed up’ the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addreses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips form computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom.”

If nothing else, it’s clear that there was, to some extent or another, something wrong happening on both sides of the argument, but it’s hard not to see Viacom as coming out of all this as something of a villain. While Google might well be a the stuff of conspiracy theorists’ nightmares, the fact is that Viacom comes out of the whole business looking worse…