BC Law IPTF Blog

One of my favorite artists, Billy Bragg, blogs his approval of MySpace’s update on who owns artistic content on the social networking site.

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.

From the MySpace legal language:

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.

Go, MySpace! Respect your artists, and they’ll continue to use you and music appreciators will continue to look to you for new music!

See also my other post on how the Industry’s shutting down of Kazaa is only going to hurt them.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 29th, 2006 at 1:27 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.