Billy Bragg on MySpace
OUT-LAW Radio, 31/08/2006
Singer Billy Bragg discusses his triumph in getting social
networking site MySpace to change its small print. Plus: how a
wi-fi connection and hundreds of cheerleaders helped to defeat a US
lawsuit.
A text transcription follows.
This transcript is for anyone with a hearing impairment or who
for any other reason cannot listen to the MP3 audio file.
The following is the text spoken by OUT-LAW journalist Matthew
Magee.
Hello, and welcome to OUT-LAW Radio, the weekly podcast which
keeps you up-to-date on all the twists and turns in the world of
technology law. Every week, we bring you the latest news and
features that help you to make sense of the ever-changing laws that
govern technology today. My name is Matthew Magee, and coming up on
this week's show, we hear from singer Billy Bragg on how he took on
Rupert Murdoch, and won. And we talk to the trail blazing US lawyer
who stood up to the recording industry and may have just set a
legal precedent with startling repercussions. But first, here's the
news.
Apple makes iPod patent payout, Home Office admits citizen
databases were compromised, the New York Times bans UK readers from
terror article and the Business Software Alliance wants Courts to
introduce penalties for unlicensed software use.
Apple has agreed to pay leading rival Creative Technology
$100,000,000 to settle an iPod patent dispute lifting the threat of
an iPod drought in the US. Creative had sued Apple over the use of
navigation systems to find; and organise music on iPods, which it
said violated patents held by Creative for its rival Zen players.
iPods are made outside of the US and creative had threatened a ban
on importing of the devices into America for sale.
Security at Home Office Citizen Databases has been compromised
five times the Government has admitted. Four workers have made
unauthorised use of information on the identity and Passport
service, while one incident involved the Prison Service Sentencing
Database the Home Office told OUT-LAW Radio. The databases are
being run out of the same Government Department that would operate
any identity card database, causing opponents of that scheme some
security worries. Phil Booth is the National Co-ordinator of
anti-ID Card pressure group, NO2ID.
"It is plain that this is going to be
utterly secure if their own staff are performing security breaches
then this can hardly be considered to be secure. The inside job is
far and away the biggest danger that these can involve.
Centralising all of our identity data into a centralised register
in the Home Office Control is going to expose, you know our
information to risk of abuse and you know the only way to avoid
exposing all of our personal information to these sorts of risks is
not to accumulate it in the first place."
The Home Office said that staff had been reminded that
unauthorised use of data could result in a prosecution.
The New York Times has found a way of banning UK readers of its
website from viewing controlled information. The US newspaper this
week carried a story regarding the suspects in the alleged airline
bombing plot uncovered three weeks ago. The article was deemed by
the paper's lawyers to be likely to prejudice those people's trials
in the UK. Though the article could be kept out of UK print
editions, the web posed a bigger problem, but the web division of
the company has said that it managed to use its advertising system
to block access to the story from the UK.
Software industry lobby group the Business Software Alliance has
called for the Government to mandate stiff penalties for companies
using unlicensed software. The organisation says that it wants a
harder enforcement stick to ensure compliance. The group represents
major software publishers and told OUT-LAW that the current legal
regime is no disincentive to illegal users since those operating
without a licence can simply pay for the products with no penalty
for previous infringements. It wants a punitive fine to be added to
the cost of a purchase of a licence for infringing products, said
the bodies council, Graham Arthur.
That was this weeks' OUT-LAW news.
How many times have you ticked a Terms and Conditions box or
signed a form saying that you consent to all sorts of legal jargon?
How many times have you actually read what you are agreeing to? If
the answer to the second question is close to none, then you're in
good company. It turns out that the worlds pop stars hadn't read
the conditions either, when they signed up to social networking
site, MySpace. The site might be a peerless promotional tool and a
vital way to keep in touch with the next generation of music fans,
but there was just one problem. Artists suddenly realised that they
were maybe signing away all of their musical rights. Singer,
campaigner and new digital convert Billy Bragg, was one of those
artists and he manned the barricades and mounted a campaign to
convince the massive firm, by now owned by Rupert Murdoch's news
corporation, to change its terms and conditions to ensure that
musicians owned the work that they posted on MySpace. He told
OUT-LAW how it all began.
"A very old friend of mine whose name was
Finn O'Loughlin, who I've known since he was a kid is a musician,
he came along to one of my shows and afterwards we were talking
about music and stuff and another friend of mine who met him that
night, decided on the back of that meeting that she was going to
manage him, and she set him up on MySpace site and being a good
conscientious manager, read the terms and conditions, and that was
where she came across this phrase Royalty Free World-wide Licence,
and she got in touch with me through my office and said look, you
know, does your Manager think this is ok or you know if you're on
there, what is your feeling about this, and like the majority of
people who posted stuff on MySpace of course we had never actually
read right through the Terms and Conditions so I said to my office,
I think it would be better if we took out stuff off there because
you know the idea of giving someone that kind of licence, which is
a phenomenally huge coverage, and you know I wouldn't give someone
those kind of rights if they were giving me an advance, you know,
never mind on a free service, so I told the office to remove my
stuff and I put up a statement explaining why we were doing it and
saying that we wouldn't put anything on until this was either
changed or was clarified."
The gauntlet had been thrown down. Bragg who was more used to
campaigning on behalf of miners and their families during the 1980s
miner strike or on behalf of the labour party in pop politics
pressure group Red Wedge, decided to take on Rupert Murdoch. He got
in touch with the site and urged them to clarify their Terms and
Conditions which seemed to claim intellectual property rights over
music posted by MySpace. At stake he says are vital rights that the
young people who post their own new music on the site are almost
certainly not aware of.
"MySpace said that Madonna's stuff is on
there, and she doesn't have any problem with that, and as I pointed
out at the time well, yeh, Madonna's got an army of lawyers. Your
average kid in his bedroom doesn't have access to that and that is
what I was more concerned about. I was more concerned about people
coming into MySpace for the first time, people coming into the new
industry for the first time. I don’t want to find out in 25 years
time that 20% of my earnings are owned by Apple or iTunes or
whatever, you know or whoever, I want the right to decide and to be
able to exploit my own back catalogue and if I choose to sign that
away to someone for life for copyright, that's my choice, but
before that happens, I want kids to know what that means and what
the ramifications of what are. The whole point it seems to me of
MySpace is to allow unsigned bands and unsigned artists to
circumvent the hurdles of the music industry by going straight on
there and testing what they have done. And that is a very valuable
service."
Soon his campaign had gathered momentum with his letter
appearing in leading magazine Music Week. Then came the news,
MySpace had issued new Terms and Conditions explicitly stating the
ownership of the content creators material rested with them. Bragg
had won.
"I think the thing I'm most delighted
about is that the principle of the right of the producer of the
material to ownership of the right to exploit their own material
seems to have been established on the largest internet community
site of them all, which is MySpace. And that is really what I was
most importantly trying to do."
It didn't stop there, just last week Bragg's prediction that
other sites would follow MySpace's lead looked prophetic as reports
emerged that Bebo, a MySpace competitor that is most popular in the
UK had followed suit. For the thousands of aspiring musicians,
writers and artists who want to use websites controlled by big
business as a promotional tool, the victory is vital. For musicians
such as the Arctic Monkey and Lily Allen, two people who made their
names on MySpace, for them to flourish they must be sure of their
legal ground. For Bragg, the digital music future represents a
chance to create a new power balance in the music industry, a
chance to redress old injustices in the ownership of creative
works.
"One of the really interesting things about
the music industry, is it's in an incredible state of flux and
where the power is going to lie at the end of this process is still
open to debate. If the big multi-national record companies have
their way, they will retain control. But the real power in the new
market place lies with those people who are able to create interest
in new music. I work with a guy called Ian MachLagan whose keyboard
player was in the Small Faces. Whenever we are on tour, every place
we stop to get petrol or food on the motorway there is always in
the CD rack a compilation of 1960s music. There is always a Small
Faces track on there and it's always one he gets no money for. I
don't want new kids coming into the industry to be signing
contracts that were written up during the time when they were
physically producing and physically distributing CDs and records, I
don't want kids coming in and signing those kind of deals."
With changes at MySpace and Bebo under this belt, Bragg is
becoming an unlikely hero of a new generation of musicians. He is
rightly proud of what he has done.
"After posting your content on the MySpace
services, you continue to retain all ownership rights and such
content, and you continue to have the right to use your content in
any way you choose. I want that to be the industry standard. I want
that on every website that is a communal website."
Thanks to Bragg, it looks as though it already is.
MySpace is not the only place where musical battles are being
fought. All over the World record and film companies are taking
thousands of people to Court alleging illegal file sharing of
copyrighted music and films. Nowhere is that battle fiercer than in
the US, where alleged infringers are sometimes offered to settle a
case for $3,500 where just instructing a lawyer can cost $5,000.
Unsurprisingly, most settle, not Tammy Marsen. When she received a
letter from a group of record labels she was adamant that she had
done nothing wrong, and would not pay the $3,500 to make the
problem go away. Her lawyer agreed, and talked exclusively to
OUT-LAW Radio about he and Marsen took on the music multi-nationals
and won.
Here is Marsen's lawyer, Seyamack Kouretchian of Coast Law
Group.
"They had alleged that Tammy Marsen had in a
shared folder illegally downloaded and made available for others to
download a laundry list of what appeared to be songs. I mean we had
continued to suggest to them they dismissed the case that we
weren't going to be fooled by the allegations and the threats.
Copyright is my area of expertise, we weren't going to fold, and I
knew they do copyright, they know they can't prove it, so we were
prepared to go the distance."
The record labels involved, Virgin, Sony, BMG, Arista, Universal
and Warner Bros had evidence that her internet account had been
used for file sharing. Marsen argued that as a cheerleader teacher
who had hundreds of girls through her house, there was no way that
the record labels could prove that the person doing the sharing was
her. A more important argument she made was that her open wireless
internet connection meant that sharing could have been done by
someone outside of her house using her connection. The case was
dismissed with the agreement of all parties. Marsen's could become
a popular defence, with some message boards already humming with
users plans to open up their wireless connections as a safeguard
against future actions by record labels.
"The best that they could do, the absolute
best was prove that the music was on a computer that had accessed
the internet through her internet connection. Dozens of girls had
access to her computer, you had neighbours who would have had
access to her internet connection over a wireless router, so I mean
it could have been anybody, the record label got in the
neighbourhood of the infringement, but they need to prove who the
infringer is, they have to do a lot better than just prove that
there was some infringement in this neighbourhood and therefore
hold Tammy responsible for it."
That's all we have time for this week, thanks for listening.
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For now, goodbye.
