Universal Music Sues MySpace Over music copyrights But Signs Deal w/ YouTube.com

DeluxeNames

Universal Music Group, the world's largest music company, said on Friday it filed a lawsuit against popular social networking site MySpace for infringing copyrights of thousands of its artists' works.

Universal, owned by French media giant Vivendi (VIV.PA), filed the suit at the U.S. District Court Central District of California, Western Division.

The lawsuit accuses MySpace of allowing users to upload videos illegally and taking part in the infringement by re-formatting the videos to be played back or sent to others. It estimated maximum statutory damages for each copyrighted work at $150,000.

In the case of YouTube, now owned by Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG - news), Universal Music reached a licensing agreement to give the site and its users access to thousands of music videos.

My Take: Looks like YouTube took the easy/cheaper way out by paying Universal for a licensing agreement. I think MySpace should have done the same. What do you think?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061117/tc_nm/media_universal_myspace_dc

MGDesigns

I think many will join the bandwagon if/when* Universal win

*delete as appropriate LOL

DeluxeNames

MGDesigns wrote: »

I think many will join the bandwagon if/when* Universal win
*delete as appropriate LOL

LOL, "delete as appropriate", hedging your bets eh?

For what it's worth, I think your right, Universal is the big dog that all the rats will follow if Universal wins.

If it does go to court, I hope Universal will loose. (oops, meant lose).

tony

or lose? :P

Rhino

it was only a matter of time until they got sued ive seen alot of illegal videos on myspace

Nuvo

Well, I've known about the YouTube deal for ages and the fact that some big company is taking MySpace to court only serves to make me incredibly happy, but this also brings up the whole P2P and VHS issues again.

It's completely legal to use P2P software, excluding those that use it to distribute illegal or copyrighted content which they do not own, which is basically saying that you can't download Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest from Limewire because you don't own the rights to it and it's a commercial product, but then again, you could download Mandriva from a Torrent because Mandriva allows you to.

As long as the service has a legitimate use, it cannot be deemed illegal, only the users that upload copyrighted material they don't own are the problem.
If MySpace were to remove the movies from their service and if they were truly unaware that such movies had been uploaded (you don't seriously think sites like YouTube have people watching every movie and running it through encoding software before putting it online do you? It's all done automatically by the software running the site), they might be able to get away lightly.
If they knew such things were going on and they did nothing about it, then yes, they'll get a good kicking, just like Napster and some other P2P services as they host the data on their servers (P2P clients hardly ever use a central server network these days as that's how they get taken out... If you've got illegal files on the server, then the authorities go after you, but you can claim that there's a legitimate use for your decentralised P2P client and \ or network).