• Financial Times, Wednesday, December 6, 2006 10:30 AM

The battle between Universal Music and MySpace could prove crucial in determining the future relationship between traditional media companies and the Web sites that depend on them for content.

The lawsuit filed by Universal follows similar claims made by the recording company against two other user-generated sites: Bolt.com and Grouper.com. But the MySpace lawsuit figures to be more pivotal because it brings together two media giants with high-powered legal teams.

This battle, however, will be fought on uncertain grounds, with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act taking center stage. News Corp. claims that the DMCA protects MySpace from being responsible for the copy-protected files its users upload. But that piece of legislation was written years before MySpace and other social-media sites existed, a fact that copyright experts say adds considerable uncertainty to the matter.

The DMCA was originally written to protect ISPs from being responsible for the content uploaded by subscribers, but it also protects companies from user copyright infringemen--as long as it complied with requests to take the material down and had no prior knowledge of the infringement. It's that last area which becomes particularly gray in a case like this; MySpace's executives have to know that copyright infringement is widespread on their site, but proving that could be more difficult.

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