Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve certainly heard about the extremely popular site YouTube.com which features hundreds (if not millions) of videos that you can easily access and watch at just a click of a button.

The only problem, is that an estimated 90% of those same videos are copyrighted content, and the holders of those copyrights aren’t very pleased with it.

Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest record company, recently accused YouTube of being a serial copyright infringer. Universal CEO Doug Morris said as much during a Merrill Lynch investors’ conference speech last month.

“The poster child for [user-generated media] sites are MySpace and YouTube,” said Morris, according to publicly released transcripts of the closed-door meeting. “We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars.”

YouTube officials did not immediately respond to request for comment.

From where I stand, I think that YouTube is giving free advertisements for all those videos and companies. It’s not like a person will refrain from buying the movie in a much higher quality format because he saw it on YouTube. At least not me certainly!

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