The free-for-all has begun. Less than one week after Google purchased internet video sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion, copyright negotiations have been stepped up, royalties are being demanded, domain brokers are scrambling and all sorts of hanky panky is coming to light.

Time Warner Chairman and Chief Executive Dick Parsons served notice he’d play hardball with Google and YouTube by telling Britain’s Guardian newspaper that his group would pursue its copyright complaints against the video sharing site by kicking it upstairs to Google’s level.

Time Warner, which owns Warner Brothers movie studio, Time magazines and the HBO television channel, is one of several large media companies that have complained of possible illegal use of its material on YouTube. Critics have argued that Google’s deep pockets will make it a magnet for lawsuits in the wake of the deal.

On a lighter note, Steven Colbert, cable television’s popular faux newscaster, told viewers in a video posted to YouTube that he deserved $700 million in royalties because “my show is all over YouTube. You put my name in YouTube you pull up more than 2600 videos. That’s gotta be, like, a third of all their videos.”

Meanwhile, the fallout from the deal is being felt thousands of miles away in a small Ohio town that his home to Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment and – you guessed it – utube.com.

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