If he is providing a copy of a video that is unavailable on youtube then he is providing a service and I have no problem with him getting a little revenue from it. One problem with streaming media is the long tail and most stuff in the public domain has very little value and therefore very little incentive for someone to upload it.
I have no problem either with this either, but Google does not choose do do this and he has no standing to dispute it. If he had a contract or even a verbal agreement to begin with, you could say that Google acted in bad faith, but he didn't, he merely gave an unsolicited video, explicitly not covered by copyright to Google and asked for a cut. It's not wrong that he asked for a cut and if Google had have given it to him, I would not object to it, so long as they did not prevent others from re-uploading the same video under the same terms.
What I do object to is the gall of this guy to come to Slashdot, a notoriously pro-free-use forum to complain about Google using this public domain video without paying him. If he did make this work more accessible, it pales in comparison to the work that Google have done, providing hard disk space, bandwidth and searching capabilities. If he wanted to distribute it, why didn't he host it himself?