Popular video sharing site YouTube has recently been hit with a lawsuit claiming that YouTube allows copyrighted video to be uploaded.

It’s unlikely this will go anywhere, considering that the US’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has a clause which protects websites from claims over copyrighted material uploaded by their users. Oh, and if you’re in the UK (or anywhere else) you might be basically immune to the DMCA, but us Europeans have the EU Copyright Directive to guard us from wrong-doing.

Nevertheless, online sharing sites like YouTube have come under scrutiny from organisations like the BBC for hosting their content. While it might seem OK to people in the UK, because they have paid their TV licence and believe that they should be allowed to do whatever they want with the content, when you consider that if BBC content, for example, gets on YouTube, people outside the UK haven’t made any contribution to the BBC and this could be damaging them.

Also a point rased in this BBC blog post about YouTube was that YouTube seems to be getting away with allowing users to host potentially infringing material, where if the BBC were to infringe rights, they would immediately be found out and have to settle.

Whether this lawsuit against YouTube is successful in the favour of the accuser (which personally I don’t think it will be), it will no doubt be the start of more legal battles between the intellectual property owners and the public and companies that host this kind of site.