The MySpace Series Part V – Who Owns Your Content? Billy Bragg Pulls Pages In Protest.

You can’t argue with the numbers or the cost. MySpace is consistently in the Top 5 most visited sites with 30 million daily page views; and most things that act r or fan would want to do on MySpace are offered free.  But there is a growing concern over how MySpace might utilize a band’s content and profit from it.

Few would argue MySpace’s need to make revenue to provide bandwidth and services or the site’s right to place ads on an acts page.  But long-time UK rebel singer-songwriter Billy Bragg has pulled his MySpace page because he fears the site can do a lot more with what bands are posting without permission or reward. MySpace has said in response that it will alter it’s policies.

"The real problem is that they can sub-license it to any company they want and keep the royalties themselves without paying the artist a penny," Bragg told the The Register. "It also doesn’t stipulate that they can use it for non-commercial use only which is what I’d want to see in that clause. The clause is basically far to open for abuse and thus I’m very wary."

The questionable MySpace Terms & Conditions language reads in part:

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.

No instances of MySpace abusing it’s privileges have been made pubic and they claim that they will change the language as some other internet giants from Google to Microsoft have been forced to do. But for now the Terms & Conditions remain in posted and in effect raising larger questions of how in all of the massive amounts free artist and fan content being posted on community sites worldwide could be used and exploited.

Read the rest of Hypebot’s MySpace series here and watch for more installments next week.