I didn't think that it would come to this, but on Friday, November 17th, Doug Morris - the "capo di tutti capi" of the Four Families of the Recording Industry - made good on his promise as the Universal Music Group filed suit against MySpace and its parent, News Corp. At issue are allegations of copyright infringement, inducement of infringement and violations of California business and professions code.

A statement released by UMG read: "Businesses that seek to trade off on our content, and the hard work of our artists and songwriters, shouldn't be free to do so without permission and without fairly compensating the content creators. Our music and videos play a key role in building the communities that have created hundreds of millions of dollars of value for the owners of MySpace. Our goal is not to inhibit the creation of these communities, but to ensure that our rights and those of our artists are recognized."

Of course, UMG's perspective is absolute rubbish, the worst kind of ignorant posturing and corporate bullshit. As far back as September, in a private meeting with investors, Universal's Doug Morris said, referring to MySpace and YouTube, "we believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars," setting the stage for this month's legal action. At the time, I felt that UMG and News Corp, a member in good standing of the copyright cartel and a much larger corporation than Universal, would come to a "gentleman's agreement" that would allow both to milk the consumer for every dime they could.

Well, folks, I was wrong. The issue, apparently, between the corporate giants is the practice of MySpace users posting "illegal" video clips and songs from major label artists on their individual pages. Among UMG's many gripes, reported by industry publication Hits Daily Double, is that "the site not only allows users to upload videos illegally, but has also taken part in inducing the infringement by re-formatting the videos for users to play back and send to others." This alleged collaboration between MySpace and its users supposedly prevents the popular social networking site from falling under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's (DMCA) "safe-harbor provision," thus rendering it vulnerable to litigation.

Of course, MySpace's development of software that allows users to share videos was done with the idea that thousands of indie bands, and their tens of thousands of fans, could use the video feature for band promotion, thus attracting more eyeballs to the advertising overkill found on MySpace. That a number of users have violated the site's policies by posting "copyrighted" material is irrelevant. If Universal wants to cut off their nose to spite their face, the Reverend doesn't care. However, if Morris were a smarter man (he's not), he would look at MySpace as a 24-carat promotional opportunity and work out a deal to flood MySpace with low-rez music and video clips and encourage the site's millions of teen users to share indiscriminately.

For their part, MySpace released a statement stating that "MySpace provides an extraordinary promotion platform for artists, from major labels to independent acts, while respecting their copyrights. We have been keeping UMG closely apprised of our industry-leading efforts to protect creators' rights, and it's unfortunate they decided to file this unnecessary and meritless litigation. We provide users with tools to share their own work; we do not induce, encourage, or condone copyright violation in any way."

To stave off future lawsuits, MySpace has been working on developing "fingerprinting" technology to identify copyrighted recordings as well as tools for copyright holders (i.e. big media companies) "that makes it even easier and faster to remove content they allege is unauthorized." It remains to be seen how the site's attempts to pacify its fellow cartel members will impact the site's thousands of independent artists, but I suspect that we'll be hearing of problems in the future with the Four Families attempting to bully bands and artists without corporate sponsorship in one way or another. The only real winners in this fight are the founders and early investors of MySpace, including the ubiquitous "Tom," all of which cashed out after News Corp bought the social networking site for $580 million in cash a mere two years after its launch.

To recap, for our slower readers who still swallow the industry's self-serving propaganda: one bully has challenged another (larger) bully to a good old-fashioned schoolyard scrap. Rather than "beat the bootleggers," as Frank Zappa once did by finding bootleg albums of his work and re-releasing them himself, Universal has chosen to greedily make a grab for tens of millions of dollars by crying "copyright infringement." The resulting fracas will probably leave News Corp and UMG relatively unscathed, but the legal fall-out is certain to negatively affect Universal artists as well as thousands of indie artists that currently make MySpace their home.

Of course, when Universal and the other major labels show as much concern about their artist's royalty payments as they do about their "intellectual property," the Reverend will stop bitching about them....