I just noticed this thread so allow me to shed a little light on the situation. I am a first year law student planning to pursue a career in copyright and technology law, and I've been studying copyright issues for a long time.
a-m-v.org really is not in as bad a situation as people generally tend to think, even as the site's owners apparently thought during the Windup incident. As a site that hosts videos, this site qualifies as an ISP under the DMCA, which makes it just like YT or any other video sharing site on the net. Assuming this site complies with the DMCA provisions on notice and takedown, where a copyright owner can send a takedown notice to the site's admins and demand an infringing video be taken down and the site complies, a-m-v.org should be immune from secondary liability under the Safe Harbor provision of the DMCA. While the admins understandably did the safest thing in the Windup incident and thus managed to avoid a lawsuit altogether, if they had been sued they would have had a pretty strong case. However, it's not as certain that they would have prevailed as it is with YT since this site is unique in that it not only allows users to upload videos but encourages the uploading of a particular type of video and provides the ability to designate the song and anime used in a video. This could be viewed as a knowing encouragement of infringement which would deny the site safe harbor protection and make it vulnerable to secondary liability under the US v. Grokster decision.
Ultimately, there are fairly strong arguments on both sides, though I'm inclined to think a-m-v.org probably would have won since the presumption is for safe harbor protection. Of course that's in an ideal world where this site could actually afford the humongous legal fees to hire a competent copyright attorney to defend it. Though I'm willing to bet if it ever came to that a digital rights group like the Electronic Frontier Foundation would have been wiling to defend it for free (pro bono). In the end, they were certainly better off avoiding a lawsuit for the time being and just sacrificing some videos, though eventually the site may eventually be faced with a situation where it has to either shutdown entirely or stand up and defend its rights as a service provider under US copyright law. Give me three years to graduate from law school and pass the bar, and I'd be willing to defend it myself.
Now just another word of encouragement to everyone. AMVs are not as forgone a conclusion with regard to copyright as most people here seem to assume. There are actually strong arguments to be made for why AMVs can be considered fair use, which I have detailed in a post on my blog
here. I myself have successfully defended a number of my AMVs against copyright claims on YT, including a number of videos swept up in the Warner Music dragnet, which is actually easy to get around since all you have to do is file a dispute and the video is instantly restored. Most recently I got one of my Final Fantasy 7 AMVs restored after receiving a DMCA takedown notice from Square Enix, for which I had to go through the whole process of filing a formal counter-notice and waiting three weeks for them to respond before YT restored the video. You can read the whole story
here. So there is hope, and if you are willing to stand up and take some risks to defend your rights under fair use, you can successfully navigate the troubled waters of copyright law and come out on top. You just have to be willing to fight for it.
~Patrick M.