On the NPR program "Day to Day" this week, I hit the blogosphere with host Alex Chadwick to test-drive Microsoft's new blogging service, MSN Spaces. We kick the tech tires, and explore some of the territory also covered in these two previous BoingBoing posts: (MSN Spaces: Seven Dirty Blogs, and MSN Spaces = soylent green).
Link to archived audio for this program, Link to NPR Day to Day home.
In related news, BoingBoing reader Joshua Wattles — who also happens to be an entertainment law attorney in Los Angeles — offers a different opinion on the ToS for MSN Spaces:
I noticed your concern about the Microsoft copyright language. I wouldn't worry about it too much. The operative, and curative, clause in the legal dribble is this "each in connection with the MSN Web Sites" as part of the whole in line recitation of "For materials you post or otherwise provide to Microsoft related to the MSN Web Sites (a "Submission"), you grant Microsoft permission to (1) use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission, each in connection with the MSN Web Sites, and (2) sublicense these rights, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. Microsoft will not pay you for your Submission."
It means, all those rights relate only to the uses Microsoft (or a sublicensee) makes in connection with its MSN Web Sites application and service – – and that's just logical since the material is being deposited on MSN web sites and it needs to know it can have it reside there. Amongst us lawyers and our affiliated judges, this language would not fairly be interpreted to mean in context to permit Microsoft to appropriate the material for a use of its own such as putting together a SLATE made up of MSN blog mash-ups, for example.
And BoingBoing reader L. Mosier points to a website that put the new blogging service through a "racial epithet test."
The website Illegal Voices, which names the MSN Spaces post on BoingBoing as inspiration, tested MSN Spaces for whether racial epithets were allowed. MSN has a reputation for booting hate sites and chats from its domains, but, as the author notes, "I was surpsried to find how easy it was to create a blog with a slur in its title." The author concedes that, though free speech is a major issue online, most major sites are united in banning hate speech and take strong steps against it. Interesting survery; MSN seems to prohibit the "n-word" but allows other derogatory terms.
