Baton Rouge-based indie rock band Bones was in for a scary surprise when they went to check their MySpace page only to find the face of David Boreanaz, star of the televised series Bones, staring back at them. All 2,000 of the band Bones' friends, blog postings and MP3s had disappeared into the ether care of the Fox network.Fox, which is owned by the same parent company that owns MySpace, struck a deal which allowed them to take over any page in the MySpace system that they felt was capitalizing on their intellectual property. You know, like, the word "bones." Once news of the URL takeover went public, everyone's friend Tom gave the band back its MySpace page saying, "I heard about what happened with your URL. I gave it back to ya...Sorry about that! As we grow in size, sometimes people make decisions I don't know about. This was obviously the wrong decision. The Bones URL is yours once again."
If you're band is named House or Prison Break, I'd check your MySpace page real quick.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
11-11-2006 @ 1:47PM
RIta said...
At first I felt bad (yeah its sucks to get things taken away from you with no warning).
Later on I realize that Mediacorp maybe jerks but they have every right to do what they did. The contract that they were suppose to read gives Myspace/Mediacorp power to take it back "at any time, for any or no reason, with or without prior notice, and without liability"
Its not like they took their site offline. Also 2,000 friend in two years? I guess not a very popular band. Also they have their own site... why not use it? or just redirect it to their myspace?
This band had the most publicity ever. Everyone should be happy. They should consider themselves lucky, there are plenty of other people who got their myspace taken over but this time it happens to be a giant conglomerate, easier to fight back, more publicity forcing a change because legally they can't do a thing.
Me being a fan of the show Bones has nothing to do with my view on this.
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11-11-2006 @ 3:52PM
Franklin said...
Come on, Rita: Myspace needs to be more reasonable here. They should have at least issued a warning to the band first, so they wouldn't have been suddenly surprised that their Myspace had been removed. Myspace should also have a feature that allows one to change their Myspace ID if a takeover is about to occur. (So "bones" could become "bonestheband" easily.)
Yes, News Corp can do pretty much all it wants. But it doesn't mean that it's necessarily right, nor does it mean that Myspace shouldn't modify its policies to make things more fair and considerate to its users.
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11-11-2006 @ 4:42PM
Sam Goldman said...
Franklin: They could very easily have told the band to go to hell. Instead, they reinstated their URL and apologized. So at least give them credit for listening to its users.
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11-13-2006 @ 11:45AM
Edgeoforever said...
This was obviously a glitch due to names similarity, which was set right in a matter of hours. Why is this even news?
Every time I go on Google to check on my favorite show for the past week, I get the desperate plight of this poor band not being able to access their site for a few hours! Oh, the humanity!
I am sure it's a first in the history of the internet!
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