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AboutFace-Book
What lies behind the furor surrounding Facebook's ever-changing terms of service.
Any time you deal with the legal system, there are two groups who can hurt you: their lawyers and your lawyers.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, discovered that this month. Facebook, like many other Web sites, has a legal description of what rights you grant them by using their system, and what rights they agree to with you as a user, which is called the terms of service (TOS). (You can find the Pajamas Media version here.)
The terms of service for any of these social sites are a little complicated, because under copyright law since the Berne Convention, a creator has an automatic copyright on all content they create. Without some other contract, you could potentially post something to Facebook and then claim royalties or damages because Facebook published it, and someone who thought they’d been damaged somehow by something a user said could sue Facebook. (Not that it hasn’t been tried anyway.) So Facebook’s TOS included a section on “User Content Posted on Site” that basically says, among other things, that when you post content on the Facebook site, you grant Facebook a license to publish that content in any way and in any form they like, and that if you delete that content, you terminate that license, although they can keep backup copies.
On February 4, Facebook made a “small change” in its terms of service: it took out the part about terminating the license when you delete the content.
The story first showed up on the Consumerist blog. As Consumerist delicately put it:
Facebook’s terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore.
Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.
Of course, there was no prior notice of the change. In fact, another part of the TOS says that you agree they can change the TOS at any time, without notice, and you agree to the change by using the service. (Suzie White, corporate counsel at Facebook, did mention it on the Facebook blog, but without any details.)
Here’s the problem: a lot of people use Facebook to advertise their work. Photographers, for example, may put some sample pictures up on the site to attract customers. No one imagines that you aren’t exposing yourself to being pirated by doing that, a right click and anyone can save an image copy. But the TOS change goes further than that: with that change, it appears to say that Facebook can use that content, or even resell it.
As you can imagine, once this story got around, there was an exquisite — and justified — kerfluffle over it. It quickly escaped from the blogs and into the national press, and a Facebook group called People Against the new Terms of Service accumulated over 60,000 members in a matter of hours.
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Charlie Martin is a Colorado computer scientist and freelance writer. He holds an MS in Computer Science from Duke University, where he spent six years with the National Biomedical Simulation Resource, Duke University Medical Center. Find him at http://chasrmartin.com, and on his blog at http://explorations.chasrmartin.com.
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14 Comments
1. ashok:Thank you for explaining this! I didn’t really look into it because I didn’t trust most of the people talking about it; it just sounded paranoid. I’ll be the first to admit I should understand these things better.
Feb 19, 2009 - 1:36 am 2. James:Facebook and myspace the dream of tyrants of old and yet to come. Fools put up everything about their lives for everyone to see. Doesn’t privacy matter?
Feb 19, 2009 - 5:11 am 3. Dave01:“First of all, while it’s the automatic response of some people on the Internet to immediately erupt napalm from all orifices…”
Classic. This sentence could be used to describe the response to any of hundreds of stories about the Internet.
Feb 19, 2009 - 5:13 am 4. e:Quite simply don’t put anything up there you wouldn’t put on a static webpage visible to everyone; because for a small fee anyone can see it.
Also many applications will snoop on you and sell that information as well. Hey, you gave it permission to access your profile.
The only privacy you can expect on the internet, is information you never put there in the first place.
Feb 19, 2009 - 5:28 am 5. Jaci:I saw all this going on (being a facebook user myself) and thought it was hilarious. Zuckerman et al have since released numerous statements saying “We don’t own your stuff, we never meant to own your stuff, it was poor wording, mea culpa.” And yet so many are still frothing at the mouth. Oh well. Some people just need to feed their victim complexes.
Feb 19, 2009 - 9:20 am 6. Peg C.:I marvel at the eagerness with which so many throw all privacy away. Facebook? Myspace? Don’t folks know all that crap can be used against them? No, thanks.
Feb 19, 2009 - 11:15 am 7. Charlie (Colorado):Peg, I think e’s point is better: don’t put information you want to be private in a public forum. (The opposite, as well: don’t expect privacy anywhere that a policeman could see you.) I am, among other things, a writer; I want people to see my writings and associate them with me, as that’s how I get work. On the other hand, I don’t want someone to feel they can use a legal trick to assert their ownership over that work. A photographer wants to be able to get people to see photographs.
The Facebook dispute isn’t about privacy, it’s about the right to own your own creations.
Feb 19, 2009 - 11:56 am 8. dancingnancie3:This just goes to show that you need to not only watch what information you post on the internet, but read through the terms and conditions before just clicking through. Facebook has an agenda… it was only a matter of time before they tried to implement something like this. Of course, I didn’t think about that when i joined facebook a few years ago.
Feb 19, 2009 - 4:04 pm 9. personal trainers austin:Good information on Facebook, thanks.
Feb 19, 2009 - 6:56 pm 10. Susan Katz Keating:You have explained an issue I didn’t understand. Thank you!
Feb 20, 2009 - 8:21 am 11. Joseph:I think you exceeded your allowed use of the word “kerfluffle” in this article.
Feb 20, 2009 - 1:32 pm 12. Utopia Parkway:Zuckerman. Zuckerberg. What’s the difference?
Feb 20, 2009 - 5:54 pm 13. coffee:the fact that Facebook change their TOS back so quickly is an indication that they knew they were doing something wrong, or at least “a little off”
Feb 22, 2009 - 11:25 am 14. zplis | what's the latest?:Thanks for sharing this. Even though i haven’t read the TOS, I’m still concern about my privacy. Good thing I haven’t uploaded any of my works and photos of me and my loved ones.
Many of my friends ask me where’s your picture? I said, I’m sorry, i don’t have any pictures in my computer.
We just don’t know where will facebook use our information.
Thanks a lot for this
Mar 22, 2009 - 4:56 am