If we have a look to Facebook terms, in the "Sharing Your Content and Information" section we can read the following:
"For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection to Facebook (IP license). This IP license ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it."
At first glance, you might not find anything wrong, but if you have a closer look, you will notice how they say "transferable" license. In short, this means that you give them a worldwide license to (a) 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 (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses. In short, they can do whatever they want with anything you post on Facebook.
I decided to look at this topic because a friend of mine told me about it last year, I just didn't believe him at that time. I guess I'll have to be careful from now on, specially to not find myself in a situation like this: http://www.out-law.com/page-8494
I think this is wrong especially when you don't know where and how your information has been used. Is there a reason why they need to own our content and information? The article about the lawsuit shows the extent of how photos can be used and cause humiliation, so everyone must be careful about what they post and be aware terms and conditions before agreeing.
ReplyDeleteI'm a social web sceptic as much as the newspaper industry, but I simply can't agree with the premise of this post. Facebook is (almost) entierly justified in their licensing of your photos. Why? Let me tell a little story.
ReplyDeleteI upload my picture to Facebook, but when I go to give my image to a friend for his website Facebook says "Nope! You gave us an exclusive license! We're suing you!" - now I'm regretting not granting a non-exclusive license. A few years later, Microsoft decides to extend it's existing 1.6% stake and eventually takes over the company. My pictures all disappear. Microsoft asks me to upload them again as Facebook's license to my pictures was not transferable to it's new owners. A transferable license really would have saved me a lot of hassle! With the billions of users, Facebook starts regularly going offline, similar to Twitter but without the funky fail whale, and Facebook decides to scale back it's picture sharing service -- it was going to pass of the task of resizing and reformatting to a third party, such as Amazon's EC2, but without the ability to sublicense the photos to a third party it instead decides users will be limited to 50 photos each. With Microsoft's billions now bankrolling the company Facebook users begin demanding payment each time a photo is displayed and Facebook begins restricting the number of views each photo can have per day to 10 to limit the huge costs associated with paying a royalty for each image displayed. On a trip to the USA I decide to post a few photos, but my friends back home can't see them. It turns out Facebook can only display the images in the location they were uploaded due to the lack of a worldwide license to display the photos.
As you can see, Facebook's seemingly overreaching licensing is simply the baseline needed to allow Facebook to operate as we know it today. While yes, Facebook could try to narrow down these terms, the future is unpredictable. Say Facebook added the following "... for use on pages operated by you on the Facebook website." Seems much fairer, right? Well, suddenly pictures are missing from your Facebook app on your shiny new smartphone - Facebook aren't licensed to display them there.
With regard to your title, I elect to copy and paste from the preceding, opening paragraph from where you will find the terms you have already highlighted: "You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook". Facebook really doesn't own your pictures and in many cases, since images can be copyright infringing, libellous, or just plain illegal, are pleased that this is the case.
Furthermore, while the legal case you highlight is interesting, it is mainly so due to the photographers stupidity in their selection of license. Flickr does not require you to select a license for your photos (over and above the similar license for display by Flickr, as with Facebook above), but the photographer chose to select one, at their option, which quite clearly allowed commercial exploitation - and then complained about it. Eventually the case was reframed around the concept of privacy of the girl photographed, and while this may well be considered a "dick move" by Virgin, the case was thrown out of court never being heard (due to jurisdiction issues, the plaintiffs were based in Texas, USA; the defendants, Australia).