Here's some rare good news on the IP front: musician and political activist Billy Bragg's campaign to get MySpace to fix their IP-grabbing Terms of Service has apparently succeeded. (A month or so back, MySpace revised their terms of service to let them grab and re-sell—to anyone—user-generated content.) Here's a relevant section of the revised terms:
MySpace.com does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you post to the MySpace Services. After posting your Content to the MySpace Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose. By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the MySpace Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com a limited license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on and through the MySpace Services.
Part of what interests me about this recent IP battle (for MySpace and YouTube) is the way that people are starting to understand that IP is an important issue for nearly everyone; IP isn't a simple scam propagated by big media to steal from everyone else—certainly that's big media's goal, but IP is much more complicated than that, and IP reform can restore some crucial balance. But that requires accepting the fact that, in a late-caplitalistic system, ignoring IP rights is foolish and attempting to completely overthrow them is hopeless. Five years ago, many people I know and respect were publicly claiming all IP should be free, and that IP was only ever parasitical. But if you're a knowledge worker—or a hobbyist content creator—limited IP rights are extremely important (note the word "limited" back there—it's a balance). And naively protesting them under the "property is theft" banner is just boneheaded, making it easier for big media to demonize technologies like P2P.
[via boing boing]
Posted by johndanseven at July 28, 2006 12:01 AM