This morning we brought you a story concerning the conflict between Megaupload and Universal Music Group. Last week Megaupload, which has been the target of the RIAA’s and MPAA’s ire for its perceived role in piracy, posted a video in …

Well, it looks like the most popular video site on the Internet is making somebody money—but it might not be Google. Universal Music Group reports that YouTube is making them “tens of millions of dollars.”

Rio Caraeff, executive vice president of Universal Music Group’s eLabs and head of their digital group, told CNET:

The “first and only”s we hear about often aren’t worth mentioning; some piddly little company makes a piddly little announcement every other day.  But thanks to a new deal with Universal Music Group, Imeem is able to use the phrase in a way that tends towards the important and large side of things.

YouTube is becoming the unwitting arbiter of copyright disputes, and in the process finds itself between a rock industry and a hard face…wow, that was really bad wasn’t?…Conservative blogger and columnist Michelle Malkin is crying foul after a music industry DMCA notice quieted her criticism of Hip Hop artist Akon.

Universal Music Group has filed a copyright violation lawsuit against social networking juggernaut MySpace.com. The case, filed in a U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, alleges that MySpace allows its users post to copyrighted soundtracks and music videos on their websites.

The purists and pirate-pardoning, and by that I mean anybody outside the business, know that music wants to be free. The world’s largest music company, Universal Music Group, seems to be the first megalith to get that. Before the end of the year, expect your music to ride freely on the back of a SpiralFrog, courtesy of Madison Avenue.