Rapidshare loses court battle against German booksellers

[Ninjalawyer]

Technically, Youtube is not a copyright violator because it follows the safe harbour requirements of the DMCA. Although that does underscore how difficult it is to police user-upload files; it's hard to imagine how a small hosting operation could ever hope to do it effectively if Google, the very face of big data, can't do it with near total success.

[murraypaul]

Well, technically, YouTube is a copyright violator, because they are hosting copyright materials. However, they are immune from any punishment for this as long as they can show that they follow the Safe Harbor procedures.

http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise33.html

The safe harbors don’t say that an act by a service provider is not an infringement, like the many exceptions to the exclusive rights of a copyright owner that are detailed starting with Section 107 {FN74: 17 U.S.C. §§107-122} in Chapter 1 of the Copyright Act. Instead, they go to the penalties against a service provider for any infringement. A service provider can still be found to have infringed a copyright, even within the safe harbor. Congress was concerned that it might be difficult to get an injunction against a service provider when that service provider was not an infringer.