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"Brad Greenspan, the guy who started the company that created MySpace before it was sold to News Corp in July 2005, just notified me that he's suing News Corp today over alleged censorship.  He's also launched CensorSpace, a blog that aims to shed light on MySpace's tendency to block certain services.  A press release is being sent out, too.\nWhat Brad is opposed to is MySpace's blocking of certain widgets, something that's been covered heavily on Mashable.  Recently, they blocked Stickam's webcam widgets from being posted to the site, but in the past they've blocked (and later reinstated) players from YouTube and Revver.  This happened before the launch of MySpace Video, making MySpace look anti-competitive.  However, now they've gone and done something that hits much closer to home: they've blocked players from Brad's own video-sharing site, Vidilife.  From what I can see, some Vidilife content still appears on the site, suggesting that this may be a block of new content, rather than a deletion of existing content.  \nThe folks at Mashable Labs are able to track the usage of widgets on MySpace, and saw more than 60,000 MySpace pages with Vidilife content at last check - in other words, this will really hurt their business.  He's also standing up for Photobucket, Imageshack, and Slide.com, all of which he thinks could be at risk of being blocked in future.  On the one hand, he may have a point: MySpace's tendency to block widgets could be seen as anti-competitive, and it's certainly not good for the users.  On the other, it's their site to do with as they please.  \nHowever, the history of MySpace makes the story all the more interesting.  Brad, you'll remember, sued News Corp in the past, alleging that the sale of MySpace to News Corp was unlawful.  Brad recently set up FreeMySpace,  a site that argues Greenspan's side of the story - a week or so later, his original case against MySpace was dismissed.  This story is far too intricate to explain in such a short space - and it's even harder to do so without treading on the toes of the people involved - but basically Greenspan was the largest individual shareholder in Intermix before it was sold to MySpace - he claims to have opposed the sale.  MySpace, he says, shouldn't have sold, and the alleged low price that was accepted from News Corp meant that he and the other shareholders lost out.  Suffice to say, there's a strong disagreement between News Corp and Greenspan, whose company, LiveUniverse, owns Vidilife.\nBut the story gets yet more interesting when you realize that LiveUniverse is acquiring startups which may have a MySpace element to them: Flurl.com, for instance, was acquired at the end of October, but doesn't yet rely heavily on its MySpace players.  \nI'm not in a position to take sides, but hopefully that's an accurate representation of the story.  Brad is putting out a press release today that will fill in the details.\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2006/11/02/myspace-founder-sues-news-corp-over-censorship/>