Should Photobucket Apologize To MySpace?

There seems to be a controversy regarding the recent banning of Photobucket video’s on MySpace. According to TechCrunch, this blockage seems to be some sort of bullying tactic, informing Photobucket that MySpace holds the keys towards their success.

Many users are venting their displeasure over on the Photobucket blog, which alerted their users of the ban by the social network king.

MySpace however seems to be countering that this has nothing to do with politics, but rather with policy, as Photobucket was allegedly advertising on MySpace via slide shows, a big no-no according to NewsCorp’s policies.

(Paid Content) MySpace continues to block services that embed advertising. The latest is Photobucket, which MySpace claims is inserting ads in video slideshows and thus violating the MySpace terms of service. Last month. […]

“Photobucket recently began running an ad-sponsored slideshow and encouraged users to post these ads in bulletins and profiles throughout the community. We spoke to the company about their actions, but they refused to respect our community’s terms and we had no choice but to disable their service. MySpace does not block third party embeds or services that abide by our terms of use. We support the freedom of expression and creativity of our community and must continue to protect the experience expected by our users.”

The article goes on to explain that apparently the problem does not lie mainly with either Photobucket or MySpace, but rather a small number of sponsored slide shows who are using Photobucket’s service to promote their product for free, something Newscorp does not enjoy.

Since the Photobucket slide shows and the video can not be “separated technologically,” Newscorp has opted at censoring both items, forcing users to either vent online or use other services.

Photobucket is a very popular image service for MySpacers (note: did I just invent a new word?) and this censorship of their media content could not have come at a worse time.

Whether or not Photobucket should remove the “offending slide shows” (that is if MySpace has pointed them out) only time will tell. But hopefully this situation is resolved soon as the ones losing out most are unfortunately the people using both of these services.