tombrennan.org

It’s now been 4 days since my account has been deleted.  I sent the support team an e-mail that day when I couldn’t get in.  Now I get this reply…

If you’ve stumbled across this article by entering in some key words into a search engine, please comment on this and tell me what you think.
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.

MySpace has deleted your profile because we have received repeat complaints of copyright infringement regarding your account. As you know, MySpace’s Terms of Use Agreement provides: It is the policy of MySpace.com to terminate Membership privileges of any Member who repeatedly infringes the copyright rights of others upon receipt of proper notification to MySpace.com by the copyright owner or the copyright owner’s legal agent.

Thank you,
MySpace.com

————————-

At MySpace we care about your privacy. This email is never sent unsolicited.

If you think you’ve received this email in error, or if you have any questions or concerns regarding your privacy, please contact us at:

privacy@myspace.com MySpace, Inc. 8391 Beverly Blvd. #349 Los Angeles, CA 90048 USA ©2003-2007 MySpace.com. All Rights Reserved.