It's a mess, plan and simple. I've been following closely the whole Viacom vs. Youtube lawsuit. From what I remember they were argumenting with the fact that Youtube has to actually review every single upload, and it's not that difficult to establish a digital fingerprint for a music video, thus they can't hide behind DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act that deals with user uploads).
As a basic rule, the site owner has 48 hours to take down user uploaded, copyrighted content upon the notification from the copyright holder.
After a lengthy battle Google (YT) lawyers eventually somewhat defended it with the legal fiction that they as a portal couldn't recognize which videos are uploaded to promote the actual artist etc. with the copyright holder contempt.
All in all, as I'd understand it now, it's either that you have a license for that (such as VEVO) or can somehow keep it online as "fair use". That doesn't mean it won't get pulled the moment the copyright holder decides that it should get pulled.