Will YouTube be sued?

Here's an abstract from an interview given by Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann to John Battelle:

"(...) when most people think about potential legal liability for YouTube, they are thinking about potential copyright risks. And although nothing in the Internet legal realm is entirely certain, YouTube looks to be on relatively firm legal ground. Unlike some more aggressive companies (like the old Napster), YouTube has the benefit of a set of special "safe harbors" created for online service providers as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). If your activities fall within the safe harbors, as defined in Section 512 of the Copyright Act, you can't be liable for money damages for copyright infringement based on those activities. There is a different safe harbor for each of the following activities: providing network access ( e.g., your ISP), caching, storing material on behalf of uses (e.g., web hosting), and providing information location tools (e.g., search engines and linking).

One of those DMCA safe harbors was designed to protect providers of hosting services. When it was passed, Congress had big web hosting services in mind, but the rules work just as well for video hosting services (like YouTube), blog hosting (like Blogger), and music lockering (like MP3Tunes). There are a number of requirements that a hosting provider must meet, but the most important one is the implementation of a "notice-and-takedown" policy. YouTube has such a policy in place, allowing copyright owners to notify it of infringing videos and taking them down promptly upon receiving such a notice. Other requirements include implementing a policy of terminating "repeat infringers," which YouTube also has, and registering a "copyright agent" with the Copyright Office, which YouTube has done.

The outer boundaries of the DMCA safe harbors are still being hammered out in court (porn vendor Perfect 10 has been leading the charge on behalf of copyright owners on this legal front). And it's not just YouTube that is interested in these legal fights -- because any legal precedents undermining the safe harbor would put Google, Yahoo, AOL, MySpace, eBay and others at risk--the biggest Internet players have a stake in the outcome.  But so far, so good for YouTube. It looks like YouTube is working hard to keep its boat in sheltered copyright waters. (...)"

For the full interview, click here.