Whose Video Is It, Anyway?

When YouTube was sued on July 14 for copyright infringement, the shock wasn't that the video-sharing service was being yanked into court. Questions had been swirling for months about whether the upstart, which now dishes up 100 million daily videos, was crossing copyright boundaries by letting its members upload videos with little oversight. What was surprising was that it was an individual who fired the first shot—Robert Tur, an independent photographer famous for filming the 1992 Los Angeles riots—instead of a big Hollywood studio or major music label.