Material witless

The exponential rise in popularity of user-generated websites MySpace and YouTube has brought to the fore the fact that the copyright laws governing these media are a grey area. By Graham Simkin and Kevin Smith

[from The Lawyer]
On 17 November 2006 Universal began an action for copyright infringement in the US District Court of Los Angeles against the popular networking website MySpace. The claim follows a breakdown in negotiations between the two companies for a content licensing deal. Universal had threatened similar action against YouTube, another highly successful networking site specialising primarily in videos, but ultimately settled for a reported seven-figure equity share as part of Google's $1.65bn (£841.02m) acquisition of the site.

But as the popularity and membership of each site has skyrocketed, so too has the amount of copyrighted content being circulated. This has raised important questions about the rights of copyright owners in relation to the distribution of their content on these sites. Also, because of the rapid growth in popularity of both MySpace and YouTube with consumers (MySpace now claims a membership of more than 50 million), each site is now able to attract significant advertising revenue and they have become a major distribution channel for music and video. Unsurprisingly, they have become the target of large-scale claims.

User-generated and peer-to-peer sites
Both MySpace and YouTube began as user-generated (UG) sites, as opposed to peer-to-peer (P2P) sites. Traditionally, P2P sites have focused on distributing existing third-party material as opposed to new, original material created by site members

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