All Your Base (Blog) Are Belongs to Us: Microsoft's View of the Blogosphere

Submitted by cel4145 on December 3, 2004 - 11:22.

The recent news is that Micorsoft has unveiled their new blogging service, MSN Spaces.

Okay. No surprise that Microsoft has gotten into the blogging business. But it appears that Microsoft has made some decisions about how the blogosphere ought to operate. For instance, this Boing Boing post discusses the censorship that prevents certain words from being used as the title of your new blog. More disturbing to me, though, is the earlier Boing Boing post from yesterday which points to an intellectual property statement on MSN Spaces. If you use Microsoft's service, what portion of your content belongs to them?

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."

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Although on one hand I can se

Submitted by Sara Jenkins on December 3, 2004 - 16:22.

Although on one hand I can see that Microsoft has the right to do what they want with info submitted onto their servers using their free service, censoring online speech seems to be the thing these days. I just recently came across this article from Poynter that recounts one instance of just how insidious blog censorship can get. Perhaps such strong backlash against online free speech is in proportion to how pervasive such speech is. But I wholeheartedly agree with the BoingBoing article: "If you can't speak freely on a blog, what's the point of having one?" If I couldn't say whatever I want--and however I want to say it--on my personal blog, I wouldn't bother. Sadly, I think that for many would-be bloggers out there *having* a blog is more important (and lately, status-worthy) than actually fully utilizing the platform.

I loved the quoted bit about Microsoft not paying for submissions; since many people don't pay for the Microsoft products they use, maybe that's tit for tat. ;-)

Sara D. Jenkins
http://www.avidity.net/academics

All Your Base (Blog) Are Belongs to Us: Microsoft's View of the

Submitted by ADE Bloggers (trackback) (not verified) on December 9, 2004 - 13:45.

"kairosnews": The recent news is that Micorsoft has unveiled their new blogging service, MSN Spaces .