Control Of Your Online Content – Think Again
By rough estimates, the number of rioters over Facebook’s sudden change in ‘terms of use’ amounted to less than 1% of the entire Facebook community. And all the blogs (including ours) that reported the Facebook hoopla have ignited nothing more than a small containable dumpster fire.
Regardless of the final legal wording – Facebook and many other [free and paid] online services will continue to get away with murder for the unforeseeable future. These services ‘will’ effectively co-own your online stuff for as long as you let them.
Remember: Even after this latest fiasco – Facebook will continue to retain the right to share whatever information you upload to their site — whether it’s your home video, photos of your frat party or just a private love letter to your girlfriend. Facebook can legally put ‘your’ data to work for ‘their’ benefit. And the only surefire way around being owned like this by Facebook and other providers is to:
Delete your content off the internet – NOW.
What Zuckerberg (Facebook CEO) did to raise cane was remove this one clause from Facebook’s terms of use:
You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time.
This [problematic-for-Facebook] clause effectively gave ‘you’ the right to manage your ‘own’ Facebook data how you wanted. But really, it didn’t and it never will. As it won’t for many other online service including the likes of LinkedIn, flickr, MySpace, deviantART, Yahoo!, and I’m sure many others.
Even though this [now famous] clause is back in Facebook’s terms of use, your photos, video and posts on Facebook’s servers are still co-owned by Facebook.
Facebook puts it this way:
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….
Don’t be fooled. As I mentioned earlier, Facebook isn’t the only user-driven website to consume, repackage and [may already be] displaying your content anywhere in the world they see fit. Many of the major sites — like flickr, MySpace, YouTube, Google, and Yahoo! all cover their asses with the same fine print and only briefly shove it in your face when you sign up to use their service. They gamble that you won’t feel strongly enough to [squint and] read their terms. They bet you would rather get past the formalities and move on with using their service — all along planning how to exploit your family photos. Upload at your own risk.
How about comments here? I'm not saying that I disagree with your article. however you yourself have the ability to modify and delete comments on here through what ever means and we the commenter have no real rights over that because as soon I press “post comment” I give ownership of that comment to the blog, you can then edit it to change its meaning or plain delete comments that disagree with the article.
Again I am not saying that I disagree with what you are saying, however face books new policy is not even half as bad as the contracts students unknowingly sign into upon starting university which is as thus: any work you produce which makes a profit during your tenure at university immediately becomes the IP of said university at which point any profits must be handed over. My university has this policy and I understand that it is a standard across the whole of the higher education system, if I make over ten grand on a project I get to keep that ten grand and any further profit goes to the university – it sucks but this is what we get for being a part of a capitalist culture based around selfish ideology. Much of theology may be old hat in a modern world, but at least it taught us morals.
Quick, please, pull the plug on the interwebs … :P
It is true, though, nobody really reads the conditions and terms when they sign up for an online service. Only when actual content is placed and rumors start spreading people look into the ToS and then realize they've been had. And 95-99% of the people doesn't really care, because they think that what they publish is public domain anyway. It is only potentially dangerous for artists, because you don't want to upload your music, the novel they're writing, the paintiings, photography, etc, only to find out they don't really fully own it anymore.
You do 'not' give up ownership after pressing 'post comment.' Your comment is yours unless we establish some kind of written user agreement [like Facebook's]. Not sure without consulting counsel, but I think if we altered your comment and left it here under your name (minus stripping it of say, vulgarity), we'd open ourselves up for copyright infringement. A lawyer could better answer, but I for one wouldn't take a leap of faith and start tinkering with our readers' comments.
I'd say making the first $10K is quite a deal — if you're doing it on university time….
We agree artists are the ones who suffer. I'd say we disagree though on the 95-99% of people not caring. People care if they know. But do they care enough is the question. ;D