Does the bot play copyrighted material? Is it legal to host this?

[Jontes-Tech]

I'm worried that a user in my guild would play copyrighted material putting me in trouble.

[tonischumacher1337]

Hello,

yes the bot is able to play copyrighted material.
It can play audio from different sources so it entirely depends on the source material.

The bot can also play music from youtube. The majority of the material on youtube is copyrighted. I have no education in law so don't take this as legal advice. Playing music from youtube in a private environment is probably not copyright infringement. You could also play a Song that you bought on CD in your room with some friends being present. As long as you don't play it for the public or for commercial purposes you should be fine. Of course if you enable everyone in your discord server to use the bot it's hard to consider that to be a private environment. It is also against youtube TOS to use bots to access their service.
The way I see it is that this bot is not really ideal as a public bot. I prefere it as a private bot for me and a group of close friends whom I trust to not use my bot to break the law.
The way I handle it is that I set up a text channel that only me and my friends can access. The bot only accepts commands from this channel (!settc #channelname ) . The bot has been running for over a year now without any issues.

If you don't trust all users in your discord to not use the bot in a way that can get you in trouble, you shouldn't enable those people to use the bot.