I’m not a lawyer but in another life I did a ton of intellectual-property research, and your analysis seems spot-on.

If MySpace didn’t have this clause in their terms, they’d have no license to show anything you posted to anyone else and, since anything you create is your copyrighted work, they’d be committing copyright infringement if they did show it to anyone else. If it weren’t there, someone could write and record a song, upload it to MySpace, and then go to court; the proceeding would look something like this:

Judge: Mr. Murdoch, you distributed this person’s song to third parties. Did you have a license?

Rupert Murdoch: Well, Your Honor, he did upload it to our site…

Judge: I didn’t ask if he uploaded it. I asked if you had a license to distribute it.

Rupert Murdoch: Well, no, not explicitly…

Judge: I find for the plaintiff. Mr. Murdoch, you’re guilty of copyright infringement.

The “residual” bit is much the same; large content storage systems use a lot of redundancy (that’s the ‘R’ in ‘RAID’ — Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks — which is one of many ways of handling huge amounts of data), and there’s no guarantee that when a file is deleted in one part of the system it will immediately disappear from all other parts. So the license covers that, too, just in case.

But that doesn’t make a very interesting story, does it?

It’s as if people are ok with hearing that MySpace is evil and that they don’t really care all that much. Now, if you look at the terms and conditions with more than a casual eye then they don’t actually look particularly evil anyway, but even without questioning it people don’t seem to be all that worked up about it all…