As for videos that have been taken down, I hope the folks at YouTube had the smarts to actually delete them - best not to keep content that has been taken down in case some dumb judge comes along and demands you hand it over. I suspect a court order will mean that there is no copyright violation though, as long as Viacom deletes it all once they’ve finished their fishing expedition. A smarter move would have been to use an independent intermediary to do the research though.

Still sad that the courts don’t understand what user generated content sites are, and how they work.