Although Collins owns the copyright to his own music, and all licensing deals for the track have expired, MySpace wouldn’t allow him to make the song available on his profile. Grace Maxwell, the manager and wife of Collins, wrote about the unpleasant surprise in a recent blog post.

“I was told Edwyn was attempting to breach a copyright and he was sent to the Orwellian MySpace copyright re-education page. Quite chilling, actually. I naturally blew my stack and wrote to MySpace on his behalf demanding to know who the hell was claiming copyright of Edwyn’s track?” she wrote.

Well, as it turns out, Warner Music were claiming the song as their own and MySpace bought into it without even checking. After she found out about this, Maxwell contacted one of Warner Music’s lawyers who promised to resolve the issue, but months have passed and MySpace is still not allowing the song to be uploaded.

“That is because MySpace are not equipped to deal with the notion that anyone other than a major can claim a copyright,” the manager writes, adding that the file-sharers are not the biggest ‘bootleggers’ – the record labels are.

Several big shot labels are still selling Collins’ track today even though their license to do so expired several years ago. This basically means that the labels are pirating his music, and making profit from these activities.

Trying to stop the labels is useless according to Collins’ manager. “Attempting to make them cease and desist would use up the rest of my life. Because this is what they do and what they’ve always done,” she writes.

There is still hope though, says Maxwell. Instead of abusing copyright for profit the music industry should work on new business models that allow fans to enjoy and discover unlimited music, while artists get their work heard by a larger audience.

“Now let’s get on with working out a wonderful new way for music lovers to enjoy music for free or for a small subscription that makes it legal and easy to hear ANYTHING and allows the artist to reap the rewards of such freedom of access. Viva la revolucion!”

In the meantime Collins can put the song on The Pirate Bay, isoHunt or Mininova and link to it on MySpace.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

They will advertise with the popular slogan: “Have it your way”. However, it’s doubtful if DRM will be “an option”.

Earlier this year Fox and ABC started to offer TV streams, but that’s clearly not the solution. People demand high quality, cheap, DRM free content, whenever and wherever they want.

Selling downloadable TV-episodes is the first step in the transformation of TV. Offering the episodes for free, supported by micro-ads is the second.

Gillian Smith, media director at Burger King, said:

“We know our customers spend a lot of time on MySpace. The important thing for us as an advertiser was to make sure we were providing content that resembles entertainment more than advertising.”

The 24 downloads will be available on Myspace next week

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.