By Frank Ahrens
Sunday, July 16, 2006; F07
Come and listen to my story 'bout a man named Ted,
a glib senator, always talked 'til he was red.
And then one day he was ranting on the Hill,
and up on the Web went a nifty little trill.
A song, it was!
A parody!
On MySpace!
Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, delivered a long, rambling expostulation on net neutrality on June 22. The speech offered, it's safe to say, highly novel explanations of how the Internet works. Something about a series of tubes and dump trucks. It was widely lampooned, chiefly on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show."
"Ten movies streaming across that Internet and what happens to your own personal Internet?" Stevens asked. I'm guessing it was a rhetorical question. "I just the other day, got Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why?"
"The Daily Show" host Jon Stewart answered: "Because you don't seem to know [anything] about computers or the Internet? But that's okay. You're just the guy in charge of regulating it."
Of course, the Internet is full of really smart and smart-alecky people with time on their hands. Andrew Raff -- a self-described "underemployed law graduate" in Brooklyn with an interest in the Internet and intellectual property -- set the words of Stevens's jeremiad to a folky tune. Raff created a page called the "Ted Stevens Internet Fan Club" and posted the song there.
Three days later, Raff got an e-mail from the MySpace administrator, saying the song had been removed because of a violation of My Space's terms of service.
MySpace, for the uninitiated, is the world's most popular social-networking site, with something like 85 million users. One Internet tracking firm noted that in May of this year, fully one-third of all Internet users had visited MySpace.
So powerful a marketing tool is MySpace that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought it last summer for $580 million. The company is making MySpace a cornerstone of its new digital strategy, and is even launching a sister TV network to Fox called My Network.
Raff couldn't figure out why his parody song violated any of MySpace's 27 terms of service.
The folks at Public Knowledge, an advocacy group in Washington that fights for open access to the Internet and other consumer issues, pointed out that News Corp. has some good reasons not to anger the powerful head of the Senate Commerce Committee.
Art Brodsky, Public Knowledge's communications director, pointed out that Stevens's committee recently passed legislation that would benefit News Corp.'s Fox television and DirecTV divisions. There's no upside for News Corp. to have one of its business units making a senator look foolish.
I asked a MySpace spokesman why the song was removed. The answer turned out to be far less conspiratorial than procedural.
For obvious copyright reasons, MySpace does not let users post non-original music. The chief violators of this rule, MySpace spokesman Jeff Berman said, are MySpace users who put up fan sites. For instance, if users post Jay-Z songs on their Jay-Z fan sites, those sites come down.
One of MySpace's many monitors found the "Ted Stevens Internet Fan Club," saw there was a song on it and assumed copyright violation. Without further investigation, the page was taken down and the e-mail violation notice was sent to Raff.
Alerted to this, MySpace checked out the situation, found the mistake and reposted the song.
"We work hard to protect musicians' rights on MySpace," Berman said. "Because this profile was of a 'fan club' it was removed, just as a fan club of Metallica or Johnny Cash would be removed if they tried to post music to which they don't own the rights. Once it came to our attention that this was user-generated content, we immediately reinstated the profile."
The song is posted at http://www.myspace.com/tedstevensfanclub .