The Latest in Facebook Hubbub
February 17, 2009 – 10:10 am by Griffin Hammond
From the historic outcry over the News Feed rollout, or the debacle that was Beacon, any time Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg shares his thoughts on the Facebook Blog, there’s a 50/50 chance it’s because people in Facebookland are unhappy.
Most recently, Zuckerberg responded to controversy surrounding a change in Facebook’s terms of service (TOS). The old TOS stated that a user’s content no longer belongs to Facebook once that user terminates his or her account. Now, Facebook retains the rights to that content.
As the Consumerist points out, it sounds like Facebook is claiming a license to do whatever they want with your intellectual property, forever. But in Zuckerberg’s latest post, he clarifies that this is simply complex legalese to say, if you leave Facebook, the wall posts and messages, etc. you sent your friends will remain on Facebook.
When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information.
He claims they’re not trying to own your content, but only want to continue to provide a platform for you to share content with others, and this TOS language is necessary for them to do so.
A lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective of the rights we need to provide this service to you.
As a video editor, someone who is very conscious of ownership and TOS aggreements, there are a couple lines in the Facebook TOS that have always bothered me:
You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you Post…
[Again, you grant Facebook the complete right] to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising…
I trust Zuckerberg’s intentions to let me keep my intellectual property rights and believe his interpretation of the TOS as a vehicle for sharing content with other Facebook users worldwide, but the TOS is still unclear. In fact, based on the current TOS, I still can’t tell exactly how my uploaded videos and their rights are treated.
I won’t be content until there is a specific provision to prohibit Facebook from using my photos and videos to advertise their brand.
