[colonwqbang]

Source on this? I thought this was the whole point of US laws like DMCA. If you comply with all reasonable and lawful takedown requests, you are supposed to be safe.

It particularly shouldn't require YOU as web host to try to ascertain the legal status of every 100-year old sound clip. That's not realistic, as Youtube's experience clearly seems to show. It does require you to respond when someone sends a signed document claiming it's theirs.

I'm not a lawyer etc., would be happy to have this explained if I'm wrong.

[ThrustVectoring]

A healthy dose of legal realism here: doing something that is technically within the scope of the law as written does not fully remove the risk and expense of getting sued over it. The process is that you can still get sued by Viacom for a billion dollars, spend a ton of money on lawyers and discovery over many years, and wind up making the entirely reasonable call of implementing ContentID or the like and settling. You do more than you're legally obligated to do on behalf of copyright owners, but whatever, the people uploading videos bear the brunt of this cost.