Not sure if you guys have been reading the news, i dont read a great deal, but try to keep up with most of it.
Basically, with megaupload being raped, every other filehost took drastic action in order to avoid being on the hitlist, although they already were before they knew it. So what's with google/youtube?. Well, thing is here, if hotfile and the rest of them are sucessfully sued and shutdown, one could perfectly reason that Google is the number one pirate company. After all, you can google just about anything and get it. One could also argue that it isnt google's fault. One could also argue the same if I were the administrator of a forum, and bots were posting warez. So you see, here we have a very interesting situation involving fucking huge companies. This isnt mere speculation. Google are actively fighting hotfile's corner, because it knows that if these cases are sucessful, it too is on the hitlist.
Another interesting fact is that Youtube does not make money. It loses money through the nose every day. Google supports it with its income. But, because it does not run at a profit, it is able to obtain music rights very cheap. So cheap, that it is monetarily profitable to not make a profit. They lose less money by not making a profit, than they would if youtube did make a profit. They also have the number 2 biggest domain in the world (as well as #1 - google.com).
Anyway. i've said too much already. In short: They're being strict to avoid attention.