Google gets its victory over Viacom, and big brand media overall. Is anyone surprised? The search engine giant seemed pretty confident in its acquisition of YouTube knowing the trouble it was in with Viacom. Many couldn’t wrap their heads around why Google would put so much money into a company that was being sued for $1 billion. And being sued by one of the largest media conglomerates at that.

Turns out, Google’s faith in YouTube panned out just fine. We can all stop worrying about what would happen to the worlds of user-generated content if Viacom had won that lawsuit. We’d have the legal obligation to question many of the trends that built social media over the years, unraveling much of the progress we’ve seen so far.

At least that was the initial fear. It’s been so long since the Google-Viacom lawsuit first began that I’d assumed the whole adventure was over. Google won with YouTube long before the courts decided, and Internet democracy had already arrived.

The big media companies had already begun to change their tune, partnering with YouTube instead of taking it to court. It was the classic case of "if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em." Turns out "’em" were the people.

Once the world learned of Viacom’s own manipulation of YouTube’s system for its own gains, the people had an opportunity to lose faith in big brand media all over again. But it had become such a part of our online experience, that even Viacom’s transgressions no longer mattered. You can still find a good Jon Stewart clip on YouTube.

So the constant commercialization of YouTube has yet to deter its users; in part because they still get what they want from the video-sharing site. This is where the legal battle really played out, with YouTube opening the channels for Viacom and the others to meet their consumer demand face-to-face.

Does this mean that it’s really Viacom that wins in the end? That won’t be much of a thought until big brands of any sort can figure out the best profit margins around a social media-sharing tool. YouTube’s flexing its muscles still, with a number of individual projects across multiple platforms, devices and streams. This leaves YouTube to create a new type of big brand media, instead of falling prey to one school of thought or another.

Here’s some good copyright lessons learned on the Google-Viacom suit.