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Technology Lifestyle MySpace is my place for piracy – is YouTube next?
Technology Lifestyle MySpace is my place for piracy – is YouTube next? | MySpace is my place for piracy – is YouTube next? |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Saturday, 18 November 2006 | |
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Reports of MySpace being sued by Universal have flooded the Internet in the last few hours, with News Corporation calling the lawsuit ‘meritless’. Despite MySpace instigating ‘fingerprinting’ technology to ferret out unlicensed use of commercial music, negotiations between Universal Music and MySpace have failed. It’s likely that Universal just wanted more than News Corp was willing to pay, and with Universal scoring success with payments from Microsoft for every Zune sold (which may not end up amounting to very much if people keep on buying iPods), they clearly felt emboldened enough to take on News Corporation, a company with its own vast content library, from the 20th Century Fox movie business, to TV networks, magazines, newspapers and more across the globe. Clearly, the issue of copyright protection for content in the digital era is one that will not be resolved anytime soon. With tens of millions of MySpace pages playing music of some kind as background music for site visitors to enjoy, News Corp clearly does not want to be responsible for paying for their customers’ infringing behaviour, especially at a time when News Corp is still trying to figure out how to have MySpace actually make them some money instead of it costing them money. It’s an interesting parallel to Google’s troubles with YouTube, with the fortunes of YouTube and MySpace closely interlinked as huge numbers of YouTube videos are embedded into MySpace sites. After all, Universal has said that YouTube is also a massive copyright infringer. Now that both those companies have wealthly sugar daddies of owners, the lawyers have clearly been licking their lips at the prospect of massive fees, no matter who wins or loses, for as we all know, lawyers always win no matter what. But the loser in all of this stands to be the not-so-innocent teenage copyright infringer. MySpace would likely dearly love to have users pay for a song to appear on their MySpace page, preferably chosen from a content library of millions, iTunes style, with profits flowing to the music companies and to News Corporation. Fees could be charged to use a song for a set period of time, or the rights to use a song on a specific MySpace page could be granted ad infinitum. The big problem is, if MySpace starts asking its users for money, the fickleness of Internet users may see a mass defection to another site, be it FaceBook, Orkut, Friendster or an as yet relatively unknown social networking minnow. And if that happens, what would News Corp have paid $582m for? A big pile of bits and bytes quickly evaporating into the limitless bounds of cyberspace. Rupert Murdoch clearly doesn’t like to be taken for a ride, so everything will be done to prevent this from happening. Rupert Murdoch may be wondering why he made MySpace his place, although some say it was a bargain compared to what Google paid for YouTube. But now that he has, we’ll all get to enjoy the legal fireworks. Sit back and relax, this one’s not going to be over anytime soon! {moscomment}
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