My Space (anybody's space)

[Ed]

Murdoch wants teenagers'...
...digital identities, says campaigner
By Mark Ballard
Published Wednesday 3rd May 2006 11:32 GMT

Teenagers should beware of Murdoch-owned website MySpace.com snatching their digital identities, child campaigners have warned.

Freechildsafeweb.com, which lobbies for the safe use of MySpace, said small print in the new terms and conditions, introduced since the acquisition of MySpace by News Corporation last year, could mean that careless content posted by teenagers could come back to haunt them later in life.

"If you post risqué images as a teen and later move into professional life, these images along with any comments, journals and conversations can be sold to the press and there is nothing you can do. It is worth remembering, the owners of Myspace.com - News Corp - are the Press," an unattributed article on Freechildsafeweb said yesterday.

Approximately 68m people use MySpace as a personal exhibition space and networking club. Many of these would have originally agreed to terms and conditions, (retained by Freechildsafeweb), that give the website non-exclusive rights to use the material they display there, but only while they keep it there.

"This license will terminate at the time you remove such content from the website," the old terms read.

However, new terms introduced after News Corp's acquisition of MySpace, extend the website's rights over any content their users upload.

They give MySpace "non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free" worldwide license and sub-licensing rights "to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute" any matter posted by its users, including "messages, text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, profiles, works of authorship, or any other materials".

"Content posted by you may remain on the MySpace.com servers after you have removed the content from the services, and MySpace.com retains the rights to those copies," it adds.
Paul Varney of Freechildsafeweb contacted The Register by email to air his concern:

"I want to bring this to the attention of the 65M+ (MySpace) users, as many I feel are perhaps not aware of these very different terms, especially band recordings, or young teens who post content that may come back to bite them in later years," he said. MySpace has caused a lot of concern for campaigners such as Freechildsafeweb for the way in which teenagers use it to socialise freely.

"Would you allow your 14 year old daughter to regularly 'hang out' with older men in the evening in the park, wearing masks, her pretending to be 16, they pretending to be only 17? Getting to know the intimate thoughts and personal details of your daughter's likes and dislikes, exchanging personal information about her school, location and friends," warns Freechildsafeweb's Myspace campaign leaflet.

For its part, MySpace has been trying to counter the warnings. Early last month it removed 200,000 profiles for containing risqué or hateful matter.

Yesterday, veteran child safe internet worker Hemanshu Nigam joined MySpace to take care of saftey, education and privacy. Nigam is the former director of child safe computing at Microsoft. He also fought as a prosecutor in child pornography, predator, trafficking and crime cases at the US Department of Justice and was a White House advisor on cyberstalking.

MySpace was unavailable for comment.

Source - http://www.theregister.com/2006/05/03/myspace_terms/

[Ed]

AOL tried to bring in similar terms with their customers' personal spaces and websites, etc.  That was about two years ago, but there was so much opposition that I think they relented in the end.  I remember them saying something along the lines of, "We weren't trying to steal our members' creative content..."

Yeah, right....

So, don't post any stories on you MySpace site, unless you want to give up all your rights

[SharonBell]

Yeah, there's a lesson! Not unlike my disturbing find of my work being sold on Amazon without my knowledge. Thank God it wasn't worth much, or I'd be really pissed! 

[deadwrtr]

Nothing is what it seems, that is for sure... 

[doolols]

I remember reading - if it's good enough, sell it for print publications; then try to sell it for online publications; then try to give it away to print publications; then try to give it to online pubs. If you fail at all those, then and only then stick it on your own website, on the basis that if it's not good enough for any of those, then it doesn't matter if someone rips it off.