Musicians' rights:Lost in Myspace?

[TJL]

(This appeared in Llloyd Grove's gossip column in today's NY Daily News)

Is Rupert Murdoch taking the "My" in MySpace.com a little too literally?
Murdoch's News Corp. owns the popular networking Web site, having paid $580 million last July for MySpace.com's parent company. But now, according to some MySpace.com users, the media giant thinks it also owns anything and everything that's posted there.

In recent years, the site has become the online venue for musicians to release their new material. Name-brand bands such as Weezer, Nine Inch Nails — and even aspiring rapper Kevin Federline — have debuted music on their MySpace.com pages.

But popular English songwriter Billy Bragg claims the MySpace.com "terms of service" give Murdoch's minions the right to exploit their content as they see fit.

Bragg has deleted his tunes from his MySpace.com page, which offers this explanation: "SORRY THERE'S NO MUSIC," because "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 paying the artist."

The troublesome fine print informs users that by posting any content, "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."

Sounds dire. But Myspace.com spokesman Jeff Berman says not to worry. "Because the legalese has caused some confusion, we are at work revising it to make it very clear that MySpace is not seeking a license to do anything with an artist's work other than allow it to be shared in the manner the artist intends," Berman says. "Obviously, we don't own their music or do anything with it that they don't want."

Nice to know.