Billy Bragg fights Fox Interactive on MySpace TOS and wins!

Fox Interactive is a unit of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. that was created last year to manage Fox’s U.S. websites. You’ll note that this is the Fox of Fox News Channel and other media outlets. One of Fox Interactive’s big catches was the purchase of Intermix Media for $580 million around the same time last July that the Fox Interactive unit was created. Intermix Media is, or rather was, the parent company of MySpace.com and was swallowed whole into the belly of the voracious News Corp who by December of last year had spent $1.3 billion on web properties, according to BusinessWeek. Okay, now you know the lineage of MySpace.

MySpace started its trajectory towards the top of the web as a place to hear about gigs and bands. The music component is still a major part of the site. The terms of service that MySpace required you to accept if you wanted to use the site as a musician was that Fox Interactive had ownership of media loaded to the site. That means that musicians and artists did not have control over their own content. According to the TOS of MySpace, Fox could use that content for their own purposes without the consent of the artist.

Step into the scene, my favorite British singer/songwriter for Labour, Billy Bragg. I remember listening many times to my vinyl copy of Talking with the Taxman about Poetry back in high school. I still have that record by the way. Billy is one to bring up the topic of labor unions and has probably never voted Tory in his life. He’s a really cool guy, and he writes great songs.

It only seems appropriate in 2006 that it would be Billy Bragg who takes on Fox Interactive and their onerous MySpace terms. To make a long story short, Billy got Fox to change the terms of service so that artists and musicians now own the recordings that they upload to MySpace, and Fox’s rights are much more limited to use that content within MySpace and nowhere else.

You can read all about Billy’s battle with MySpace on his MySpace blog, which you can access from his homepage there. And while you’re there, add his as a MySpace friend.

Billy writes:

I am very pleased to see that MySpace have changed their terms of agreement from a declaration of their rights into a declaration of our rights as artists, making it clear that, as creators, we retain ownership of our material. Having been adopted by the biggest social networking site on the block, I hope their recognition of the right of the artist to be sole exploiter of their own material now becomes an industry standard because there is much more at stake here than just the terms and conditions of a website.

Here is some of the new language in the terms of service:

Proprietary Rights in Content on MySpace.com.
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.

Way to go, Mr. Bragg! We salute you and the hard-won fight.

If you’re not familiar with Billy Bragg’s music, we can recommend the album we linked to above or his double-CD greatest hits package called Must I Paint You a Picture? The Essential Billy Bragg. Check it out!

For the completists in the audience, we also noticed that Billy has a huge box set released this year of remastered recordings of his albums. It contains nine CDs and is called Vol 1.