« Previous post
Next post »

October 29, 2006

MySpace Moves to Protect Copyright Holders

Michael Arrington

27 comments »

On Monday MySpace will announce a partnership with California startup Gracenote to help detect and block copyrighted music from being posted on MySpace member pages. This will allow them to be more proactive about copyright enforcement, in addition to complying with DMCA take-down notices.

YouTube made a similar announcement earlier this year, although YouTube is not simply blocking copyrighted material - instead they are encouraging the copyright holder to allow the use and take a revenue share from advertising placed around the video.

Copyrighted material, particularly music, is one of the key drivers of the success of social networks. Over 3 million bands now have pages at MySpace - it is now a defacto requirement for a band to have a MySpace presence. Competitor Bebo recently announced that they have over 300,000 bands after just one year.

Recent news suggests YouTube’s free ride on the copyright infringement gravy train may be coming to an end. They’ve complied with “requests” to remove 30,000 Japanese media clips, as well as clips from Comedy Central shows. Rumor has it that in the past, marketing departments for TV shows would anonymously upload content to YouTube to get exposure, even while their legal departments were issuing take-down notices for the very same content. Now that everyone understands the value of being the online network for TV clips ($1.65 billion), copyright holders are taking a step back and thinking about how they can get a piece of that money, too.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Bistec » Copyright Issues

    October 29th, 2006 at 6:22 pm

  2. The Death of MySpace « Lucky 8

    October 29th, 2006 at 7:49 pm

  3. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » MySpace、著作権者保護の方向へ

    October 29th, 2006 at 8:38 pm

  4. DoctorTrey.com podcast and the Doctor’s Office Recording Services » Blog Archive » MySpace and copyright enforcement

    October 30th, 2006 at 6:02 am

  5. Tech News Blog » Blog Archive » MySpace To Protect Copyright Holders

    October 30th, 2006 at 6:43 am

  6. Deep Jive Interests » Neutering of MySpace / YouTube Gaining Traction

    October 30th, 2006 at 7:06 am

  7. What Will You See Next? » Blog Archive » Painful Future on Metrics

    October 30th, 2006 at 7:35 am

  8. Cuppacafe » Blog Archive » Cuppabits October 30th

    October 30th, 2006 at 8:41 am

  9. FurryRabbits.com » Here Come The Lawyers

    October 30th, 2006 at 11:40 am

  10. TechEffect

    October 30th, 2006 at 1:05 pm

  11. Plasma Diary - An aggregation of latest updates in Gizmo World! » MySpace To Protect Copyright Holders

    October 30th, 2006 at 4:15 pm

  12. Zatz Not Funny. . .»Blog Archive » Digital Media Bytes

    November 2nd, 2006 at 9:46 am

  13. Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Universal Music Sues MySpace

    November 17th, 2006 at 3:05 pm

  14. TechCrunch en français » Universal Music poursuit MySpace en justice

    November 18th, 2006 at 12:48 am

  15. Universal Music Sues MySpace » JenIT

    November 21st, 2006 at 4:32 am

  16. Remixtures » Darknets contra Lightnets

    December 3rd, 2006 at 3:20 pm

  17. gouwef laifedu

    March 15th, 2007 at 2:58 pm

  18. Yahoo Music To Add Music Lyrics Later Today

    April 24th, 2007 at 11:25 am

  19. ::lemonup::News, Technology, sports, cars, movie, video, blog, travel, mp3, picture, computer, notebook » Yahoo Music To Add Music Lyrics Later Today

    April 30th, 2007 at 11:53 pm

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Dave Winer

    October 29th, 2006 at 5:29 pm

    Gracenote is hardly a startup, it’s been around for over a decade.

  2. Rian

    October 30th, 2006 at 1:11 am

    Quote: “MySpace will announce a partnership with California startup Gracenote to help […]”

    How is Gracenote a startup?

    Gracenote has been around a while.. I started working for an online media provider in about 2002 or so and at that time Gracenote was already the established facility to verify CD contents..

  3. Michael Arrington

    October 30th, 2006 at 1:12 am

    hm. ok, when does a startup become a “company”? When I say startup, I mean it as a compliment, by the way.

  4. Rian

    October 30th, 2006 at 1:17 am

    Didn’t mean to oppose.. was just curious as to the definition of a startup versus that of a company

  5. Andy

    October 30th, 2006 at 2:46 am

    Isn’t Gracenote the company that essentially stole all the volunteer work of Internet users to compile CDDB, which then spawned the creation of FreeDB?

  6. Matt

    October 30th, 2006 at 8:27 am

    There is a ton of news about the big corporate companies protecting their Copyrights.

    It is time for the independents to protect their Copyrights too!

    My Free Copyright will be launching end of November to bring third party date registration and protection for original digital creations.

    Find out more about My Free Copyright.

  7. Steve Sherman

    October 30th, 2006 at 8:35 am

    Extactly, Gracenote is the company that took CDDB and then tried to lock up all the patents around music meta content.. Though YouTube is more upfront on taking and owning your content.. Nothing stops them from using your posted content and making a Best of YouTube DVD or TV show and not paying you a dime…

  8. jason

    October 30th, 2006 at 1:34 pm

    Let’s save the rest of this tantalizing conversation for a post written about whether or not Gracenote is a startup.

    I believe this post is about MySpace having a successful enough music offering to be able to block copyright infringing content from their site, and about YouTube adopting a haphazard “poor man’s Revver” stance on video ownership and copyright. The MySpace move seems predictable, but also responsible. They clearly believe that obeying the law and respecting copyright will not hurt their business.

    YouTube on the other hand, seem fairly confident that simply not accepting copyright infringing material would crush their business post haste. I think this is a fairly good illustration of why MySpace is a weak product built on a solid business model and YouTube is a better product built on a flimsy-at-best business model. They simply don’t have the option of behaving responsibly, since the entirety of their business is based around behaving irresponsibly. They are still not protecting artists and creators, they are simply giving them an opportunity to step forward and say “Hey! that’s mine! Gimme some of the money it generates from now on!” No mention of the money it had made thus far, or for whom it was made.

    Disclaimer: I work for Revver. We’re so the good guys on this one.

« Previous post
Next post »