A court in Hamburg, Germany, has held YouTube liable for copyright infringement that occurred when the video site's users posted music clips on its site.

The court's holding could pave the way for large royalty payments for user-created content, at least in Germany. The German court apparently stopped short of ordering Google to police all the content uploaded to the YouTube site, but it did find that Google was liable for material that was not promptly removed on request by the copyright owner.

For more details see http://www.internetlawforums.com/index.php?topic=102.0