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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This is REALLY Crappy. What about Twitter updating the FB status and there are links to my blog that way? Do they own the writings too?
Adele
I removed by rss blog import to FB. Now I just link to it. I do have my blog as a network blog. Does that make the blog owned by FB?
As far as RSS feeds are concerned, I would not be as concerned about that since the point of origination is your blog itself and you are not actually coding that content into facebook. Most third party entities like a feed or a widget use only code to link to the original source and not the code of the source itself. What is more problematic is if you copy your blog content to a facebook note. Even though you still retain the original rights to that content, the copy of it is now licensed to facebook. The Louvre own the original Mona Lisa, but other third party companies have bought rights of copies of that image they can now sell off. The same applies to other media like blog posts or images you take with a digital camera.
See how I replied to Shuck's question. They have rights only to content you literally post there down to the source code. As long as you have the original copy, you have rights to that which remain exclusive to you. What they have rights to are copies of that you freely place in FB according to their license which you automatically consent to when you post anything there. So for an RSS feed, they can pass that link anywhere they wish, but since it is not the actual content to which that link points, they have no right to it.
More people should read license agreement's. Anything on your pc, if you run a Microsoft OS, is susceptible to being browsed through at anytime by Microsoft (looking for illegal software) or the government (if they find anything and report it) via remote access points. At least it's still technically your licensed property, but none of it is private.
IMHO… This is out & out 'Theft' and should be opposed immediately. regardles of what the Terms of Service.
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@Drew:
So, just to clarify, if I post a hyperlink to my blog on FB, then FB owns just they hyperlink.
Then, if I tried to market my blog by giving out the same exact hyperlnk address, FB could potentially sue me because I posted the hyperlink once before on FB?
no. facebook does not own the link, but they do claim a non-exclusive license to it. hyperlinks are property that someone owns by paying out a fee for a domain which includes permalink structure, subdomains, addon domains, etc. for instance, i literally own the license to use notes-from-offcenter.com and the registrar that holds that for me cannot give it out to someone else to use. it includes anything attached to that domain name. so facebook can claim no ownership to any content that a user posts, including a link. but they do claim license to it. this means they can use it for anything they want. so with a link they can send it to wherever they want (gets even weirder with things like tinyurl which is a link to a link). but they cannot sue me since i own it.
if you create something you technically own it. facebook is claiming a license to use it basically however they want. it's like handing the keys of a car you own to someone and letting them do whatever they want with it in full agreement that you are letting them do whatever they want with it.
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@Drew:
So, just to clarify, if I post a hyperlink to my blog on FB, then FB owns just they hyperlink.
Then, if I tried to market my blog by giving out the same exact hyperlnk address, FB could potentially sue me because I posted the hyperlink once before on FB?
no. facebook does not own the link, but they do claim a non-exclusive license to it. hyperlinks are property that someone owns by paying out a fee for a domain which includes permalink structure, subdomains, addon domains, etc. for instance, i literally own the license to use notes-from-offcenter.com and the registrar that holds that for me cannot give it out to someone else to use. it includes anything attached to that domain name. so facebook can claim no ownership to any content that a user posts, including a link. but they do claim license to it. this means they can use it for anything they want. so with a link they can send it to wherever they want (gets even weirder with things like tinyurl which is a link to a link). but they cannot sue me since i own it.
if you create something you technically own it. facebook is claiming a license to use it basically however they want. it's like handing the keys of a car you own to someone and letting them do whatever they want with it in full agreement that you are letting them do whatever they want with it.