While Time Warner threatened it, universal did it. And sued. The target though wasn't GoogleTube, but rather video sharing sites Grouper and Bolt.com. Grouper was recently acquired by Sony. So Universal is suing one of its fellow major recording labels.

Universal is taking the licensing very seriously as it pursues small web sites. Most the top video sites have licensed or are in negotiations to license music shared by their web users, including Google/YouTube, News Corp. MySpace, Yahoo, and Microsoft MSN.

The position of the video sites is that copyright infringement only affects a small part of the user-posted content and such files are promptly removed when reported.