Viacom v. YouTube presents a sort of perspective on one of the problems of cease & desist notices and "sharing" websites like YouTube. Although YouTube is now in the hands of Google, a big company with enough money and resources to defend a lawsuit as necessary, sometimes a website will host legitimate fair use material but not have the legal (financial) resources to oppose a large company when a cease & desist notice is sent.
As an example, I have a link to an event from two years ago when a large company sent a cease & desist order to a website that collected images, reviews, discussions, and un-official variants for tabletop (board) games. When the company sent the C&D, they requested that essentially *all* content for their games be removed from the website. This resulted in a lot of legitimate fair use (users' transformative works, non-commercial expressions, etc) being removed from the public sphere.
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/467096/gw-one-step-forward-two-steps-back-file-remova/page/1
Why did the website remove the content? Because the website is composed of two gentlemen from Texas who don't really know much about intellectual property law and they do not have the money to hire lawyers. Easy solution? Remove the content.
YouTube has a lot of legitimate fair use. In general, it appears that most of it stays up there. However, I am certain that Viacom would welcome taking down anything and everything that remotely resembles their copyright protected content. Because fair use is usually vague enough as to only be really discussed when it goes to litigation, it is something that small groups and individuals cannot effectively raise in response to a DMCA C&D.
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