MySpace Warms Up in the legal File Sharing Bull Pen
Baseball season is over but that’s not stopping Universal from hoping to smack a line drive off of a MySpace pitch.
Universal has filed suit against MySpace for not establishing a tighter policy to protect its copyrighted material. Universal accuses MySpace of not doing enough and of encouraging its members to swap files and broadcast copyrighted materials.
MySpace has notoriously attracted User’s attention as their agreement requires users to grant MySpace license to the content that they publish. The idea is supposedly to allow a new musician to get their music spread across the internet via MySpace. This has always raised concerns that MySpace might take advantage of new artists.
The old artists however say that users are signing the agreement and providing license to the old artist songs and videos of which they do not have the authority to grant that license. As such, it gives the user the feeling or impression that their activities are acceptable and the failure of MySpace to police copyrighted content re-enforces this misconception.
Universal is only going after $150k per video or song, and given the very small numbers of MySpace users
That number probably won’t add up to more than a few hundred million dollars or better . . .
Good thing MySpace like YouTube now has deep pockets!
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