Beleaguered social networking website Facebook has angered privacy campaigners by surreptitiously awarding itself a perpetual licence over everything its members post on their pages.
The move means that, while users retain the copyright to their content, they also afford Facebook an "irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide licence" to do whatever it wants with your posts.
In other words, Facebook is now free to reproduce everything on your page - including all your short stories, articles and photographs - and it doesn't have to credit you or pay any royalties for the privilege.
The revelation has provoked an indignant response from privacy campaigners, not least of all because Facebook quietly made the change on February 4 without issuing a press release explaining its motivation.
"Facebook, showing how smug and contemptuous they are of community, now wants to seize the rights of anything you create and happen to distribute through their networks," blogger Edward Champion fumed.
He continued: "The Facebook language clearly dictates that you are giving Facebook an irrevocable and perpetual right to distribute and make derivative copies of content you upload to Facebook for any purpose ... Whether it be a book, a film, or whatever other options Facebook may have cooked up."
Mr Champion cited the case of Alison Chang, a 16-year-old American girl whose family sued Virgin Mobile after it used a photograph of her - which had been uploaded to social media website Flickr - in an advertising campaign.
The image was bound by a Creative Commons licence, which permits third-party use but also states that the copyright owner must be notified.
And yet Facebook's new Terms of Service would appear to go one step further. Its revised policy includes a clause that explicitly grants the social networking site the right to "use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising".
In other words, don't be surprised if you find those pictures of you stumbling around in a drunken stupor plastered 60-foot high on every billboard lining your journey to work. Improbable, perhaps, but according to Facebook's new rules - which we have all agreed to - entirely legal.
Even more worryingly, there's no point in scrambling to delete your intellectual property, as Facebook's already got that base covered.
"The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service," the new rules began, before going on to list almost every facet of its services, including "User Content," "Proprietary Rights, Licences, Submissions" and most crucially of all "Ownership".
Issuing a woefully inadequate rebuttal, Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg whimpered: "We wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want.
"A lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective of the rights we need to provide this service to you," he meandered on his blog. "Over time we will continue to clarify our positions and make the terms simpler."
Despite being valued at $15 billion, Facebook has yet to generate a single dime in profits. The company celebrated its fifth anniversary this month and presently has 150 million users - the vast majority of whom are now much less productive than they used to be.
Just spotted this bit. The TOS states that the licence we grant Facebook includes "any User Content you ... (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website".
In other words, any bloggers who add a Share/Save button to their posts (like me) relinquish exclusive copyright when they do so. That applies irrespective of who initiates the sharing ("ENABLE a user to post"); therefore bloggers are signing away ownership of their writing even if they never post their content to Facebook.
I'd love to hear Zuckerberg's attempt to justify that.
Posted by: Martin (riverScrap.com) | February 17, 2009 at 11:47 PM
Yahoo tried to pull crap like this several years ago and suffered a huge backlash from the people who objected to this act of mass corporate theft. Yahoo backed down.
Simplest way of dealing with this situation is to quit the site en mass. Let's see how Facebook and its supporters/advertisers handle that.
Posted by: Lynne (weirdvis) | February 18, 2009 at 10:19 AM
Precisely - and if I actually had enough Facebook friends to warrant my using the site that's exactly what I'd do.
This also reminds me of Chrome's attempt to slip in a TOS clause stating that everything you view with the browser becomes Google's property. It backed down, needless to say, and Facebook must do the same.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1053395/Google-new-Chrome-browser-claims-copyright-users-files.html
Posted by: Martin (riverScrap.com) | February 18, 2009 at 11:56 AM
the fact that Facebook change their TOS back so quickly is an indication that they knew they were wrong in the first place
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Posted by: sparkzspot | February 26, 2009 at 01:26 PM
how come facebook is doing that....now am thinking if I will still continue to have my account with them..
Posted by: Amelia | March 05, 2009 at 01:55 AM