The Force is with Star Wars fan parodies, many of which were just yanked from popular video-sharing site YouTube. StarWars.com has just explained that we can go on about our business, because there's nothing to see here. Apparently, the Star Wars people were unhappy about some StarWars.com material that had made its way onto YouTube and they asked for it to be taken down. YouTube, always worried about the copyright case which could put an end to its Internet party, responded by taking down other Star Wars-related material.

George Lucas and company have no problem with such material, however, and have asked the site to reinstate it. While this has been hailed in some quarters as a corporate about-face, it's worth pointing out that Lucas' company still wants their copyrighted material kept off of YouTube. Though the issue did not escalate into litigation, it underscores the continuing legal uncertainty surrounding some of YouTube's practices.

If a successful Internet business can be measured by its traffic, then YouTube has the world's most enviable business model: let users provide content, then stream it to 100 million folks a day. The only rain cloud in YouTube's bright blue sky is a little thing called copyright infringement, and critics have wondered for months how the site had so far managed to avoid a flaming, Napster-style death.

The answer is that, under the DMCA, YouTube has "safe harbor" from such accusations so long as it does not upload the videos in question and removes them when requested by copyright holders. So long as users are contributing infringing material, YouTube is in the clear. Well, almost.

If the site can be shown to benefit directly from the copyright infringment of its users, it could still be liable (think Napster, which also did not provide the content for its service). A look back at YouTube's public history of litigation shows that, despite its reputation for avoiding trouble, the site actually has frequent run-ins with disgruntled copyright owners. American Airlines was unhappy about an internal training video that made its way onto the site, while film clips of a Los Angeles truck driver beating resulted in a lawsuit from the husband-and-wife team that had shot the footage.

Even when YouTube's free publicity seems like a benefit, some copyright holders still resent it. This was the case with NBC, which ordered YouTube to pull copies of Saturday Night Live's "Lazy Sunday" rap.

YouTube has already made some changes in response to the pressure, like capping the length of uploaded videos for most users. Still, as these examples of infringement proliferate, the site risks looking like the Napster of video clips, and "safe harbor" claims might not be enough to save their ship from the entertainment industry's torpedoes.