Some bright spark had the good sense to read the small print of the ‘MySpace’ terms and conditions and look what they found!…
Once an artist posts up any content (including songs), it then belongs to My Space (AKA Rupert Murdoch) and they can do what they want with it throughout the world without payng the artist.
Because of this, cuddly revolutionarym, Billy Bragg has boycotted My Space and his record company have had to take down all his songs. More people will and are undoudtedly following suit. Small clips being put up are seen as a temporary safer option.
The last line is the most sinister and hypocritical of the whole clause. Even if you withdraw from ‘My Space’ any ‘residual’ copies that “my Space may have are still the property of ‘my Space’ so even withdrawal is not a safe precaution… I always prefered the rythmn method myself! Oi, this is no time for levity!
Below is the offending clause. Bragg’s people are hoping to start a small revolution (in true Bragg style) to try and put a stop to this. Idealogically sound ‘My Space’rs can do their bit by posting out a bulletin to all their ‘friends’ and badger ‘Tom’ with e-mails letting him know how disgustingly unfair and hypocritical this clause is (not least because you can’t hear Billy on there anymore!).
It’s such a bloody shame ‘cos the great thing about My Space is how fast we can all communicate and hear new music. Hopefully if we all do our bit something might change… yeah right!… oh you never know? (see ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again…(P. Townsend)).
TERMS: (as of 17th March 2006)
By displaying or publishing (”posting”) any Content, messages, text,
files, images, photos, video, sounds, profiles, works of authorship,
or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) on or through the
Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com, a non-exclusive, fully-
paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the right to
sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy,
modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store,
reproduce, transmit, and distribute such Content on and through the
Services. This license will terminate at the time you remove such
Content from the Services. Notwithstanding the foregoing, a back-up
or residual copy of the Content posted by you may remain on the
MySpace.com servers after you have removed the Content from the
Services, and MySpace.com retains the rights to those copies.
That is why I only have crappy works in progress up on My Space.
Don’t mistake legal for evil
This excerpt from the MySpace Terms and Conditions has been floating about the place, grabbed in this instance from the Resonance FM blog where they say “once an artist posts up any content (including songs), it then belongs to My…
This is a non-issue if ever I’ve seen one.
The clause you quote above does not grant “ownership” of a song to anyone else other than you — it simply grants MySpace a license to play that song for other MySpace users without having to pay you any royalties. If not for that clause, it’d be possible to upload a song to MySpace, then sue MySpace for copyright infringement if they played it to anyone else. Even if you yourself set it up to be played on your own MySpace page when people viewed it, you’d have a solid case for copyright infringement.
And note that the license only applies “on and through the Service” (where “the Service” is MySpace). This is legal CYA on their part, and is pretty much standard for any large company that deals with user-submitted content; Flickr has a similar clause in which you agree to let them distribute your photos by showing them to other users of the site (something they’d otherwise be unable to do because the photos are your copyrighted property), most large discussion group systems have similar clauses (your posts are your own originally-authored material, again copyright prevents distributing them without your explicit permission), etc. etc.
And the bit about residual copies is much the same; large content storage systems work by keeping redundant copies of any given file in multiple places, both to save data in case a hard drive fails and to ensure consistent fast access to the data. Which means that when you tell them to delete a file, all copies of it might not disappear from MySpace’s disk arrays immediately — typically there’s a periodic process which runs through and cleans up files that need to be deleted, but if it ran all the time it’d bring the system to a halt. So again, in order to avoid inringement of copyright on those files, MySpace has to be granted rights to those files for the time that they remain on the servers.
Billy Bragg:
I am very pleased to see that MySpace have changed their terms of agreement
from a declaration of their rights into a declaration of our rights as artists,
making it clear that, as creators, we retain ownership of our material. Having
been adopted by the biggest social networking site on the block, I hope their
recognition of the right of the artist to be sole exploiter of their own material
now becomes an industry standard because there is much more at stake here
than just the terms and conditions of a website.
In the past, songwriters and performers needed a record company to
manufacture, market and distribute their work, and in exchange for that, the
company expected to own the rights to exploit the recordings for as long as the
material was capable of earning royalties - life of copyright in legalese which
currently means 50 years.
Ive always had a problem with that arrangement, arguing that the recordings
Ive made should provide my pension not that of some record company
executive. In order to achieve this, I have held on to my rights, signing licensing
deals in which ownership of the records reverts to me after a stipulated period,
usually ten years. I figure that if a company cant make their money back after
that time, they dont deserve to put out my records anyway.
Every few years, the reversion clause kicks in, my back catalogue returns to my
ownership and I begin the licensing process all over again. Not only does this
strengthen my hand in contract negotiations, it also allows me to take account
of new technologies in a rapidly changing industry.
Now that the popularity of downloading has made physical manufacturing and
distribution no longer necessary, the next generation of artists will not need to
surrender all of their rights in order to get their music into the marketplace. It is
therefore crucial that they understand, from the moment that they first post
music on the internet, the importance of retaining their long term right to
exploit the material that they create. This is doubly important on a networking
site where many of the songs posted will be by unsigned artists. Ownership of
the rights to such material is somewhat ambiguous. Thats why I hope that the
groundbreaking decision of MySpace to come down on the side of the artists
rights will be followed throughout the industry.
I also welcome the new wording of the terms and conditions in which MySpace
clarify exactly why they require specific rights and how they intend to use them.
Again, I hope more sites follow the lead of MySpace in ensuring the use of clear
and transparent language in contracts. The last thing any of us wants to see is a
situation in which everyone posting a song on the site has to have a lawyer
sitting next to them.
Im glad my music is available to the community again and Im glad that
MySpace chose to act on my concerns. In order that we might avoid any such
confusion in future, can I suggest that MySpace notify its members of any
changes in the terms and conditions whenever they take place.
Billy Bragg
Proprietary Rights in Content on MySpace.com.
MySpace.com does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) that you post to the MySpace Services. After posting your Content to the MySpace Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose. By displaying or publishing (”posting”) any Content on or through the MySpace Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com a limited license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on and through the MySpace Services.
Without this license, MySpace.com would be unable to provide the MySpace Services. For example, without the right to modify Member Content, MySpace.com would not be able to digitally compress music files that Members submit or otherwise format Content to satisfy technical requirements, and without the right to publicly perform Member Content, MySpace.com could not allow Users to listen to music posted by Members. The license you grant to MySpace.com is non-exclusive (meaning you are free to license your Content to anyone else in addition to MySpace.com), fully-paid and royalty-free (meaning that MySpace.com is not required to pay you for the use on the MySpace Services of the Content that you post), sublicensable (so that MySpace.com is able to use its affiliates and subcontractors such as Internet content delivery networks to provide the MySpace Services), and worldwide (because the Internet and the MySpace Services are global in reach). This license will terminate at the time you remove your Content from the MySpace Services. The license does not grant MySpace.com the right to sell your Content, nor does the license grant MySpace.com the right to distribute your Content outside of the MySpace Services.
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Resonance FM Blog » Blog Archive » songs… or is it?
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