Facebook

[ivyfic]

I got into a legal discussion at work which ended with me looking up the TOS on Facebook. It seems that anything you put on facebook, you give them the rights to it. You can still use it yourself, but only non-commercially.

ETA: Nevermind! edgehopper has cleared this up for me! (See below.) I wouldn't be surprised, though, if one of the networking websites did try to stake a claim on the stuff posted there. Maybe I'm just being paranoid.

"All content on the Site and available through the Service, including designs, text, graphics, pictures, video, information, applications, software, music, sound and other files, and their selection and arrangement (the "Site Content"), are the proprietary property of the Company, its users or its licensors with all rights reserved. No Site Content may be modified, copied, distributed, framed, reproduced, republished, downloaded, displayed, posted, transmitted, or sold in any form or by any means, in whole or in part, without the Company's prior written permission, except that the foregoing does not apply to your own User Content (as defined below) that you legally post on the Site. Provided that you are eligible for use of the Site, you are granted a limited license to access and use the Site and the Site Content and to download or print a copy of any portion of the Site Content to which you have properly gained access solely for your personal, non-commercial use, provided that you keep all copyright or other proprietary notices intact. Except for your own User Content, you may not upload or republish Site Content on any Internet, Intranet or Extranet site or incorporate the information in any other database or compilation, and any other use of the Site Content is strictly prohibited. Such license is subject to these Terms of Use and does not include use of any data mining, robots or similar data gathering or extraction methods. Any use of the Site or the Site Content other than as specifically authorized herein, without the prior written permission of Company, is strictly prohibited and will terminate the license granted herein. Such unauthorized use may also violate applicable laws including copyright and trademark laws and applicable communications regulations and statutes. Unless explicitly stated herein, nothing in these Terms of Use shall be construed as conferring any license to intellectual property rights, whether by estoppel, implication or otherwise. This license is revocable at any time without notice and with or without cause."

Any legal-minded people out there want to weigh in on this? It seems like a massive land-grab of intellectual property--the upshot seems to be that if you uploaded a photo on facebook and then wrote a book and wanted to include the photo, even though you took it, you'd have to license it from facebook. Even when you license a photo to be published you don't give up the rights to it, under any normal circumstances. If I wrote a story and put it on facebook, essentially, I wouldn't be able to sell it. So are people aware that they're giving their intellectual property away to facebook?

ETA: Livejournal, on the other hand, only claims rights to the software that makes the site run and their own trademarks. They specifically state that journal content is the property of the poster, probably to prevent them from being liable for it.

Comments

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

You posted the wrong section of the terms--what you were looking for is:

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content. (emphasis mine)

The contract distinguishes between Site Content and User Content; Site Content (listed in the part of the terms you posted) is the stuff published by Facebook; their pictures, icons, code, etc.

But, if you post a picture or story, it looks like under the terms, you retain the rights to the content, but have given Facebook a license to use it in whatever way they want as long as you keep it published on their site.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks for clearing that up. This actually applies, of course, to a book we are doing which consists entirely of photos posted on facebook. We knew we had to contact the original photographers, but the prospect of the book being held hostage by facebook itself is kind of scary.