YouTube Hit with Lawsuits

May 7, 2007 -- Google video-sharing site YouTube (youtube.com) has been hit with a series of lawsuits, starting with England soccer organization The Football Association Premier League, who filed a lawsuit Friday in New York against the company, accusing the site of enabling users to violate copyright law.

That same day, NBC Universal and Viacom filed a friend-of-the-court brief in California in support of journalist Bob Tur. Last summer, Turr filed a lawsuit accusing YouTube of infringing on his copyrighted material by posting without his permission video he documented during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

There are also reports from Thailand that the government there is considering suing YouTube for posting a video that it says is offensive to the country's monarch.
Since March, only Tur and media conglomerate Viacom had filed copyright infringement claims against YouTube.

Despite the growing number of lawsuits against the company, it hasn't yet been fully established whether YouTube is liable when users post pirated videos. The company, which has more than 50 million users worldwide, says that it is protected from culpability under the Safe Harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.