Comments on: Web sites out of tune with musicians' rights

IP attorney Nancy Prager say many musicians unintentionally give away music rights to Web sites promising access to fans.

[skeptik]

well...

There's no such thing as a free lunch, and the devil is in the details.

I suppose everybody thought these companies, bought and sold for billions, were doing this out of the goodness of their hearts and a l33t haxor sense of open source benevolence. Information just wants to be free, after all.

[Renegade Knight]

Reality 101

These companies have to have draconian liscencing terms to make sure they have their bases covered because of the other draconian terms in the DCMA and the loss of fair use.

If intellectual property was a tad looser on how you could use it legitimatly the terms of service of these sites could be a tad looser as well.

I understand the concern, but I can't blame the companies like U-Tube and MySpace for trying to cover their butts.

[hadaso]

The main difference between Internet and record labels

An artist may use one of these "free" services but doesn't have to. The artist doesn't give up all work and future work to a distributor. Only some rights with respects to content actually posted.

To distribute her work using the internet an artist doesn't have to use a "social networking" site or a site like You-Tube. The internet itself is a peer to peer network and the artist can have her own site under her own terms. An artist can still use these services under their terms to post some stuff as promotion that leads to her other material not subject to the "free" service terms.

See also janisian.com and in particular http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.html