Back in September, Universal Music chief Doug Morris said that YouTube and MySpace are “copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars”. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that they've carried out their threat of legal action, filing a suit today that alleges MySpace "knowingly and intentionally" violated copyright law with regard to Universals' music and videos. That's despite the fact that MySpace has been working with Gracenote to detect and remove copyrighted songs uploaded by users, and that they've just announced a similar system for MySpace Video this morning (too late, it seems). MySpace, meanwhile, just put out a press release to say the suit is "meritless" and they don't "induce, encourage or condone copyright violation in any way".
It's also worth mentioning that Universal Music has already sued Grouper and Bolt.com, although it's less likely that they'll carry out the YouTube threat, since Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony BMG were all given a stake in YouTube to prevent legal action from happening. Some people even allege that they not only agreed to avoid legal action, but also agreed to sue YouTube's competitors - the source seems to be Mark Cuban's recent blog post, part of which turned out to be true when it was found that Google had indeed put away hundreds of millions of dollars to deal with YouTube's legal issues. But MySpace were trying to help out copyright holders, too: the WSJ says that MySpace were in talks with Universal Music, and the Gracenote test was designed to preclude a deal between the two. However, Universal wanted to be paid for previous use - a fairly greedy claim - and MySpace couldn't agree to such a request.