Thank you for your blog. Have a good day and may you feel the blessings of what life and love have for you on a day to day basis.

In His Blessed name,

Marvin Patton

Kiqlo

All of the major companies have been revamping their terms of use and continue to do so on an ongoing basis. It would require continuous review. I’m only warning people that they must review all terms of use before uploading anything they ‘think’ they own. I would hate to see someone lose the rights to their music or video simply by uploading it to a server… where someone else can make a buck off of it!

Regards,
Doug

I happen to think social architecture sites, REAL ones, such as tribe.net are ripe grounds for artist controlled media dispersal. At this juncture that particular one is without music hosting capabilities, yet it does allow embedded links to content sites like YouTube. I have a MySpace account which is linked with SnowCap, wherin I may set the price of the song, which they then markup. I have only been toying with it and need more exposure, so I have to consider hosting my work elsewhere. The large sites seem to be on the verge of saturation and fully slanted to video over sound only.

I just wanted to quickly remark on your article. Kudos to you for encouraging artists considering submitting their media to a third party host/distributor. Indeed, too many creative people fail to consider the business and legal aspects of the entertainment industry and intellectual property, and it can be easy for opportunistic people — be they managers, agents, record labels (big or small), or website operators — to take advantage of those who lack business acumen or a basic understanding of U.S. copyright law.

That having been said, third-party publishers and distributors are left with no choice but to require that copyright owners grant the third-party a non-exclusive license to certain rights of the copyright holder (the artist), inter aliathe rights to reproduce, distribute, and publicly display the copyrighted material. Otherwise, the third-party publisher is subject to liability for copyright infringement. That is why the language in the aforementioned terms of use agreements is so similar (and our website is certainly no exception).

If a third-party publisher seeks an exclusive license, then that is suspect, and that service should probably be avoided, depending on the circumstances.

Sincerely,

James Anderson
Managing Member
Spirit of Radio LLC

Another reason for not hosting you own content on a 3rd party is, you never know how they change their policies in the future – well, or you never know how you change yours… (Imagine that you make a cool video/song that you put online, and some marketing institution wants to buy it off you – you cannot actually sell it once you agreed to the terms that Doug has laid out…)
So: host yourself. Be happy. Be creative.

And as a plug, here are some videos that I shot.

I’m currently getting 500 script error on their site…
I’ll check out the Terms of Use when they are back up. I’m not an attorney – just simply have observed many articles and discussions talking about these content aggregators truly misinforming their users on who ‘owns’ the content, how it can be utilized, and whether or not the content provider could ever be compensated for the use.

Doug