  We report recent results of a non-perturbative determination of the static
heavy-quark potential in quenched and dynamical lattice QCD at finite
temperature. The real and imaginary part of this complex quantity are extracted
from the spectral function of Wilson line correlators in Coulomb gauge. To
obtain spectral information from Euclidean time numerical data, our study
relies on a novel Bayesian prescription that differs from the Maximum Entropy
Method. We perform simulations on quenched $32^3\times N_\tau$
$(\beta=7.0,\xi=3.5)$ lattices with $N_\tau=24,...,96$, which cover $839{\rm
MeV} \geq T\geq 210 {\rm MeV}$. To investigate the potential in a quark-gluon
plasma with light u,d and s quarks we utilize $N_f=2+1$ ASQTAD lattices with
$m_l=m_s/20$ by the HotQCD collaboration, giving access to temperatures between
$286 {\rm MeV} \geq T\geq 148{\rm MeV}$. The real part of the potential
exhibits a clean transition from a linear, confining behavior in the hadronic
phase to a Debye screened form above deconfinement. Interestingly its values
lie close to the color singlet free energies in Coulomb gauge at all
temperatures. We estimate the imaginary part on quenched lattices and find that
it is of the same order of magnitude as in hard-thermal loop perturbation
theory. From among all the systematic checks carried out in our study, we
discuss explicitly the dependence of the result on the default model and the
number of datapoints.
