YouTube, which was recently purchased by Google Inc. for $1.65 billion, is getting rid of copyrighted material from Comedy Central, The New York Times reported today.

The popular video-sharing site began purging clips from Comedy Central shows such as "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," "The Colbert Report" and "South Park."

It's speculated that after the buyout, YouTube will be more accessible to copyright lawsuits since its Google has a value of nearly $12 billion.

Last week the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers said it had asked YouTube to remove 30,000 copyrighted video clips, reported The San Francisco Chronicle.

In April NBC sent a cease and desist letter [ link : 9905 ] to YouTube.com for posting a video created by NBC's "Saturday Night Live" called "Lazy Sunday." YouTube removed the NBC videos.

In June NBC then announced a deal to buy ads on YouTube. The two companies even launched an online campaign to show how they had turned their grievance with into a valuable partnership