Facebook released significant changes to their intellectual property license embedded in their terms of service to all content posted by users of the service who maintain an account. Essentially, the language means that when you post something, anything at all, they own a license to distribute, sell, transfer license and rights, etc. that content. In essence, when you post something, you are resigning your exclusive ownership to your content.
In copyright law, unless any other laws or strictures apply, you own what you create the moment it is created. You may then sell that property or share the license to that property and do with it what you wish. This is different when you produce content as part of a job. Then it typically becomes a "work for hire".* In cases where you are employed with a for-profit company like Facebook, when you produce content, the company retains ownership of the content with a non-exclusive license. Colleges and universities are different in that they tend to lean toward the producer, especially if the property was produced as part of a faculty contract or subsidiary contract that faculty often sign as part of their work (as in a research grant with a pharmaceutical).
What this means for people on Facebook is that even if you remove your account or remove content that you currently have posted, Facebook still owns that content and can re-sell it to anyone as part of the license agreement – even if it is stored in an archive cache somewhere. Want to run for political office some day? Facebook could potentially sell that picture of you getting drunk with 30 of your closest friends to a tabloid – if they so desired. Think you posted an article you like? If Facebook also likes it, they can see it. How about that picture of a sunset you liked so much? Facebook can sell that or license it to anyone they please.
The point is that the license agreements language is as if you are employed by Facebook when you post and produce content using their service. So unless you want to be employed by Facebook without getting paid for anything you do, watch what you post and make sure you want to give it away not only for free, but that you dont mind if someone makes money off of it someday without you even knowing about it.
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Section 101 of the copyright law defines a ‘work made for hire’ as:
"1. a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment;
or
2. a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire. For the purpose of the foregoing sentence, a “supplementary work” is a work prepared for a publication as a secondary adjunct to a work by another author for the purpose of introducing, concluding, illustrating, explaining, revising, commenting upon, or assisting in the use of the other work, such as forewords, afterwords, pictorial illustrations, maps, charts, tables, editorial notes, musical arrangements, answer material for tests, bibliographies, appendixes, and indexes; and an “instructional text” is a literary, pictorial, or graphic work prepared for publication and with the purpose of use in systematic instructional activities.” United States Copyright Office. (2004). Works made for hire under the 1976 Copyright Act. (U.S. Copyright Office Circular 9). Washington, D.C. Retrieved 9/28/2006, from http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ09.pdf.
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