I should point out that YouTube itself is not being sued right now over copyright issues. (At least not in the US where their servers and ours reside at the moment.) There is a new law in place that says that YouTube is not directly responsible for content posted on it's site. Instead, the copyright owners, when they find that an individual has posted copyrighted material that goes beyond 'fair use' (such as farse, original works that include copyrighted material as part but not whole, and for purposes of scholarly discussion) they have to issue a 'takedown notice' to YouTube, who then must take it off (apparently this takes all of a few minutes, once the copyright owner finds the thing). The owners may sue the individual who posted the material if they believe it worth doing (occasionally it is, as with people posting in large volumes), and posters may sue the owners if a takedown notice is given improperly, but YouTube is only a witness in such proceedings, and not a defendant unless they do something like post something themselves, or ignore a takedown notice.

Nothing in the law, as far as I know, ever holds other websites in any way responsible for linking to YouTube's members' illegal postings (only relevant before the takedown notice anyway). Supporting precedent would be the litigation surrounding the old Napster issues. Even sites that existed solely to help connect people to Napster's network, instructed people on it's use etc. were not held responsible. Napster, eventually, was told that it was responsible for policing it's network, but only in the same kind of way YouTube is now. Since they could not, they had to shut down and start over as something different.

Another supporting bit is sites like myspace whose profiles frequently post embedded links to YouTube vids. myspace has not been attacked by anyone over those links (over many many other things, sure, but not this).

I don't think we have anything legally to fear from linking to YouTube vids or any other copyrighted stuff, so long as we avoid becomming a link site.

Morally though is another issue entirely.

In Christ,