Myspace Artists Beware

I recently became aware of the fact that when Fox bought MySpace they inherited the rights to ANYTHING you post on their site. I looked up and article on Digg.com from 2006, called MySpace/Fox Artists Beware in order to learn more about this issue. This is most troubling for those up and coming artists who chose to post their music on the site to hopefully be discovered and signed by a record company. MySpace can take any content you post, including pictures and music, and edit it or sell it without your permission.

This is extremely risky considering they do not have to credit you for your work if they chose to use it. This is similar to the concept of a mentioned in iSpy of loss of Digital Enclosure. We opening agree to use MySpace as a social networking website, however we are also agreeing to surveillance by not only other users of the site, but by the site's owners. The interest that Fox had in MySpace was the ability to use participants of the site as a desirable commodity for data mining, and advertising.

One important thing to mention is that once you remove your content from the site, MySpace/Fox not longer hold the rights to that content. So while they own the rights to your information they do not have the ability to hold that content once you delete it. Do we still to see social networks as a way to get your name out there and connect with friends, or are we inclined to believe that we should carefully edit ourselves on such sites because of the increase in privacy loss?