Spotted on: Digital Music News
Universal Music filed a lawsuit against MySpace at the end of the day on Friday.? The lawsuit claims that Myspace is allowing their users to violate copyrights, in order to make a profit off of it. The suit also claims that MySpace encouraged copyright infingement. The suit even goes as far as suggesting that MySpace owes their success to using this same material.
Myspace asserts that they are in full compliance with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which protects web sites from the copyright violations of their users, as long as they act fast when a rights-holder complains. Not to mention the fact that Myspace is a social networking site. The same thing accusations were thrown at YouTube shortly before they signed a deal with some of these major rights holders.
All links and cross-references aside, MySpace, YouTube, and even Universal are owned by huge corporations. The thing I find most interesting about the lawsuit is the part that says “UMG owns copyrights in thousands of sound recordings, including many of the most popular and well-known sound recordings in the world.”
So the soap opera continues, and somehow, the more I read, the less it all makes sense, or even seems to matter. How can a few dozen companies appear to own all of this fantastic music, movies and TV shows, and pass back and forth billions of dollars? Perhaps the real question to be asked is how just a few companies can own and make all the money off of this huge catalog of popular art.
Art, and especially music, are powerful because of the emotions they evoke, and have different values to different people. As the value of music continues to tank, these major music companies seem to striking more and more deals where major media corporations and websites are paying huge lumps of sum to each other. Money flows from Google to YouTube to Sony BMG to Viacom and around and around. Where exactly are the rest of us in all of this? Where is all this money going? If Universal won $400 million dollars from MySpace, how much would they pay to the artists?
To put it more simply, huge amounts of these catalogs were created by people who have left this world, or who are getting pennies out of billions of dollars that changes hands. The day of the post-major label is finally dawning. The age of the distributor.? Long Live D.I.Y.
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The real question that comes up in these cases are whether or not sites like Myspace and Youtube qualify for protection under the DMCA or of they are considered products and technologies under the Grokster ruling. Both can not apply as both set different terms for what constitutes infringement.
Personally, I feel that the DMCA applies but I have to wonder what Universal’s lawyers will argue. After all, I’m sure that they’ve thought of this and they still felt comfortable moving forward. They must have some kind of plan.
I guess we’ll see…
As a social networking site, MySpace stands on far more secure ground than YouTube did. The speculation is that MySpace will be pressured to sign a content deal along the lines of the one YouTube entered into with Universal, Sony BMG, and CBS.
Litigation is a sure-fire way for major companies to enter negotiation. The fact that the papers were filed at the end of the day on a Friday was a shrewd move. The actual filing (which I linked to in the post) is filled with prose painting Universal as a victim, but the claims they make against MySpace are clearly exaggerated. They actually insist that MySpace would not be what it is today without stealing all that content.
MySpace replied in a swift and powerful way, and I would expect them to find protection under the ISP/Website protection in the DMCA.