Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
But if you start to pull things without being told you open up yourself legally I think. It is better to just state the policy that they do not check the content and will remove things when being asked.
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Legally, only the copyright owner is allowed to issue a DMCA takedown. As far as self policing, you're right, once you start down that road it at the very least creates the impression that anything they missed was left up on purpose (not to mention the near impossibility of doing it with 50,000 documents a day).
That's basically YouTube's (and other similar sites) stance as well. They don't have the resources (not to mentioned the expertise) to research the copyright on every upload, so they leave it up to the owner to inform them when there is a violation. They're just a hosting service. Ultimately it's up to the users to know whether something is legal to upload, and up to the copyright owners to inform them of any infringement.