Los Angeles News Service and Robert Tur, its owner and operator, have filed a lawsuit against YouTube in federal court (Tur v. YouTube Inc., 06cv4436) because copyrighted footage, including the beating of trucker Reginald Denny during the 1992 L.A. riots, was uploaded to the site, reports Hollywood Reporter Esq. (via TechDirt). Tur cites the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 decision in MGM v. Grokster; he is asking $150,000 for each infringement (the video was viewed 1,000 times) and a court order enjoining YouTube from allowing his work to be posted.

The apparently litigious Tur, who also owns the copyright to footage of the O.J. Simpson slow-motion chase and the North Hollywood shootout between police and bank robbers, says that increasingly popular YouTube aids in infringement by allowing uploaders to use "idiosyncratic choice of descriptive terms to describe the content of the video - tags - making it extremely impractical to identify plaintiff's copyrighted works."

Fred von Lohmann, writing on the Electronic Frontier Foundation blog, says "So long as YouTube plays by a few rules, content owners can't collect damages from it, even if its users infringe copyrights." He refers to Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA); it protects web-hosting services from customers' infringing posts. "Rule No. 1 is the implementation of a 'notice and takedown' system to respond to infringement notices from copyright owners. YouTube, of course, has this in place and takes down material once properly notified by an owner that a clip is infringing," he writes.