Company says clause doesn't endanger copyrights

10:46 AM CDT on Thursday, June 8, 2006

By CRAYTON HARRISON / The Dallas Morning News

Musicians who put their songs on MySpace.com have been buzzing about a mysterious clause in the site's user agreement, but the company says there's nothing to worry about.

At issue is whether the legal language saps musicians of their copyrights when they upload songs to the site, which is owned by media giant News Corp.

Absolutely not, says Jeff Berman, a MySpace senior vice president. "This is the problem when the lawyers get involved," he said in a written statement.

The confusion came from the viral spread of messages that the giant online community is known for. MySpace is one of the Web's most-trafficked sites, a place where people or businesses can set up their own Web pages and link them to others, exchanging messages and, often, gossip.

The latest dust-up began several months ago when MySpace users began sending messages to each other about the user agreement. They pointed to a clause that stated MySpace had a royalty-free license to "use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute" their songs through the company's services.

In mid-May, a representative of folk singer Billy Bragg pulled his songs off his MySpace page because of the user agreement. Mike Snider, whose Deep Ellum restaurant All Good Cafe regularly hosts Texas music performances, saw what Mr. Bragg's camp had done and forwarded the news on to people on his mailing list.

"You see something like that and you go, 'Whoa!' " he said. But after talking to friends, he has come to the conclusion that My-Space's terms don't bestow the company with unchecked powers. Mr. Bragg's people also appear to be backtracking, though they haven't restored the music to his site.

"Our terms of service are designed merely to allow artists to offer fans their music on MySpace and to permit the site to function as designed," said Mr. Berman of MySpace. "Obviously, we don't own their music or do anything with it that they don't want."

The company plans to revise the agreement to clarify its terms for users, he said.

MySpace's license for the music also expires as soon as the musician removes it from the site, noted Wei Wei Jeang, a partner at Haynes and Boone LLP in Dallas who specializes in intellectual property.

"I don't think it's a big deal" for musicians, she said. For the free distribution and advertising MySpace provides, musicians have to agree to something, "and I don't think that something is unduly harsh," she said.

E-mail charrison@dallasnews.com