When one thinks of MySpace or Facebook, one’s first thoughts are not of copyright. Not even by me. Some think of keeping in touch with friends, or being fans of great organizations (be friends with the Copyright Alliance on Facebook!). Some think of risks to kids. Some think of ways to find good music or books. I think of all of those things. I also think about how Facebook led me to be discovered by folks from my high school days, and how those contacts have reminded me of how much I have been trying to forget those years, but I digress.

I’ve been thinking a lot about all of these issues lately while reading a very compelling new book by award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin titled “Stealing myspace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America.” It’s a compelling read and I strongly recommend it. Ms. Angwin’s research skills are extraordinary, and she tells a fascinating tale by using a narrative approach where we really get to know the key players. Having worked for a dot-com during the boom and bust, and having spent some time working with media companies, the character portraits she paints are very real.*

Copyright is not a central theme of the book — I’d say underhanded business dealings by dot-com entrepreneurs is a better candidate — but copyright issues are scattered throughout the book, and are worth some consideration.

There are two primary copyright issues addressed in Ms. Angwin’s book:

1. Empowerment of creators. This is an unquestioned plus. The book notes the various means MySpace executives used early on to grow its user base and surpass Friendster, the social-networking giant at the time. One was to promote the site as a free publicity tool for musicians. My friend Chris Castle, a music-industry veteran, has told me he makes sure bands know that MySpace is not a build-it-and-they-will-come phenomenon; there are so many bands on there that the white noise is quite high. Still, I find if I discover a band elsewhere the MySpace page can be quite valuable. That was true with a current favorite band of mine, FireBug. They had recent songs streaming on the site, and hearing them made me want to own them, and the site directed me to Amazon.com, where I downloaded them while on a business trip. (Oh, and it has a striking picture of FireBug’s beautiful lead singer and songwriter Juliette Tworsey on it, so the photo alone justifies the visit!)

Of course, it’s not just musicians who benefit from MySpace. An author I know has been on it for years and has a large fan base there; she keeps her page fresh. But she has other marketing tools, including a website, a newsletter, a blog, even a Twitter account, and of course she gives speeches and does book-signings.

2. Remixing. Okay, this is a little dicey. But Ms. Angwin points out how early on in MySpace’s growth, the developers were surprised that the site was becoming popular with teenage girls. Why? Unlike Friendster, you could pretty much customize your page any way you wanted, so it became like a girl’s locker or notebook, a blank slate for expression. Now of course, much of that expression involved other people’s original expression; that is the definition of remix culture. It is so much easier now to appropriate someone else’s work, why start from scratch?

That’s understandable, if somewhat of a challenge in terms of rights of creators. But I have seen this up close. After I joined Facebook (a decision I’m now doubting) my 14-year-old daughter joined MySpace. (She said she didn’t join Facebook because it was for “old people.”) I was pretty alarmed; I know some of the concerns regarding minors with a site where anonymity is the norm. But she has all of the privacy settings on max, and her grandmother is her first friend, so she’ll be looked after.

Instead of going out and gathering friends, my daughter began playing with her page, incorporating a bunch of anime and other downloads she saw advertised. She LOVES anime. Now how much of what she was playing around with was licensed to MySpace and how much was she infringing, I don’t know. MySpace now actually has an active program seeking to license all sorts of media for use by its members. But ultimately one has to have some perspective here. My daughter pasting a few of her favorite anime characters on a MySpace page? Not that harmful to the copyright owner. Someone taking the entire movie of “An Officer and a Gentleman” and placing occasional fart sounds in the soundtrack? Hardly a transformative work.

Fair use is a scale. The extremes are easy to define, the middle harder. But ultimately — and this is only my opinion — the infringement we see on social-networking sites is more on the innocuous side of the scale.

Oh, and buy Ms. Angwin’s book!

*My apologies for the fact that this blog is turning into a literature review column, with recent posts on Jon Meacham’s “American Lion” and Paul Starr’s “The Creation of the Media.” I guess I’m subconsciously trying to compensate for the reduction of book reviews by newspapers.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 10:34 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under blogging, creators, fair use, internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.