MySpace is popular partly for its "user generated" content, which often means commercial content, only stolen. That's something you might get away with as a small, poor and obscure site, but it becomes increasingly hard when you're a Web giant owned by News Corp with Google stumping up almost $1 billion to sell your ad space.
Now the world's largest music company -- Vivendi's Universal Music Group -- has filed a lawsuit in California following the breakdown of talks with News Corp. Reuters says:
The lawsuit accuses MySpace of allowing users to upload videos illegally and taking part in the infringement by re-formatting the videos to be played back or sent to others.
The Reuters story also says: "Last month Universal Music sued two smaller video sharing sites, Sony Pictures Entertainment's Grouper and independent site Bolt.com."
On Friday, MySpace said in a press release that it "plans to launch a new tool for copyright holders that makes it even easier and faster to remove content they allege is unauthorized. The tool is being tested with FOX and MLB Advanced Media and will be expanded to include other verified copyright holders."
