YouTube has kind of a weird policy when it comes to copyrights. Essentially, they will leave a clip up on their site until the copyright holder contacts them and tells them to take it down. I guess it's easier to do it that way than to police the thousands of clips that get uploaded to the site every day. But that does leave it open to infringement lawsuits.

So, the fact that no one's sued them until now is equally strange. Robert Tur, a freelance news reporter, is the first to do it, suing the site for putting up his report on the 1992 L.A. riots without his permission. Now, the folks at YouTube took the clip down after he requested it, but Tur decided to sue anyway. This ought to be an interesting case; even though the site cooperated with his request, was it still up long enough to infringe upon his copyright? The site says the case is "without merit", but I'm not so sure about that. What do you folks think?