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I normally don’t spend a lot of time talking about personal things on my blog, but this really got to me.  Yesterday morning I tried logging into my myspace account and was unable to.  I checked and re-checked my login and finally got through.  Then I got a message saying that my profile was deleted.

Two days before that I got a message similar to the one e-mailed to my non-myspace account that looked just like this.  It basically said that I needed to pull copyrighted material from my profile.  I checked two videos that I had grabbed from somewhere else (a SNL clip and a Conan O’Brien clip), but they were already gone.  So what was the copyrighted material in question?  The e-mail was very vague, but I’m sure they send thousands of these message out a day.  After I noticed the two videos were gone I went back on my merry way.  Two days later I’m able to log into my account.

The only thing that I can think of that someone would think was copyright are pictures that I Photosop myself into.  The default/profile picture that I used over the past week was a picture of the Wiggles with my face on one of the Wiggles.  Was this the offending picture, I may never know.

All of the material I had posted on my account is covered by parody.  Here is a good article on parody from another blog.  I plan on fighting this thing because, as far as I can see, I should not have had my account deleted.  Should it have been suspended until the “complaining party”, myspace, and I worked it out..yes.  Deleted…no.

I also had a group of “friends” on myspace that I actually knew.  With 2 exceptions I had 67 people that I knew personally on my account.  They included past co-workers, old high school & college classmates, some local bands I am a fan of, and people I knew who moved away.  This was my soul way to get in touch with them…now that’s all gone for now.

Again, I do plan on fighting this.  From what I can read in that vague letter I know I’m right.  Maybe when the specifics get ironed out I may be wrong, but let me appeal things first.

written by tom