The Los Angeles News Service and its owner Robert Tur have sued YouTube for posting copyrighted footage on their website. Specifically, someone posted a video of the beating of trucker Reginald Denny during the 1992 LA riots.

Tur, who apparently has a reputation as “an active litigant”, is asking for $150,000 for each infringement (it was viewed 1000 times) - or $150 million in damages! He decided to sue YouTube rather than the person that upload because

“idiosyncratic choice of descriptive terms to describe the content of the video - tags - making it extremely impractical to identify plaintiff’s copyrighted works.”

Apparently, Tur didn’t even bother to send a “cease and desist” letter informing of YouTube of the copyrighted content and giving them the opportunity to remove it. YouTube has been known to cooperate in the past to letters including the popular Saturday Night Live Lazy Sunday video that went viral back in Jan 2006.

Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation blog thinks that YouTube will probably win this case based on Section 512(c) fo the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

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.

So that makes one more lawsuit challenging the DMCA.