[mkhalil]

"...textbook example of a frivolous lawsuit" - Yelp

Agreed.

But let's just say, they win. Would this force sites like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook to go the YouTube route and pay the really popular ones?

--well anyone can make money on YouTube, but unless your popular, your not going to make anything significant--

People already do this with sponsored tweets and pics, but it's not Twitter that's actually paying them.

I wonder why YouTube decided it's a good idea (obviously it was/is).

[dclowd9901]

There's not even a point in going down that hypothetical. This is beyond stupid. It would be like suing your favorite restaurant for not paying you for telling everyone how much you like it.

[Shivetya]

Well I would never have imagined that people could have sued AOL for volunteering to manage message boards; community leaders. Yet that was investigated by the Department of Labor and settled in 2010.

Does the act of encouraging people to comment on your site, where the services you comment on require investment of your money, somehow incur a debt on part of the review site to the reviewers? What if the review site has a monetary relationship with the sites being reviewed?

[Zimahl]

YouTube most likely decided to pay for videos to encourage more and better content. Without paying their content creators, YouTube would just be the place where you get started and then moved somewhere else to profit.