Out of curiousity, what problems are being caused by Facebooks ownership claims?

@philmin:

Here's an example. You're a photographer. You post your work on Facebook. Facebook decides to publish "Photos from Facebook" and they take a bunch of your photos and put them in this book. This book sells a million copies. You don't see one red cent while FB makes millions.

Kinda scummy how they profit from your work, no?

What if they decided to make a "Douchebags of Facebook" book and used a few of your posts and other information you make available on the site? Your previously private-only content is now being sold to millions of people, some of which I'm sure will be 4chaners who'll get an instant erection harassing you. Once again, FB makes you look like an asshole and profits from it.

Yes yes, I know "if it is on the Internet you should assume everyone knows about it", but there is a world of difference between the few dozen people that may stumble upon your profile and FB highlighting it for the world to see.

@chris_l:

Interesting. It seems if they did things like that, they would be treating their TOS similar to some sort of a legal contract, and hopefully that would never hold up in court if they tried it.

I cant believe these bad TOS are worth all the negative publicity.

@philmin: Except the TOS also binds you to mandatory arbitration, so the court deal is moot and you get screwed anyway. Hooray!

@chris_l: Many of my friends are writers and immediately took down any unpublished writing they had on Facebook. It might seem excessive and paranoid (heh, they are writers), but I suppose it's always better to be safe than sorry. The sad thing is, in this way, the new TOS ruins the networking value Facebook had previously. Artists could potentially distribute and critique their own and others art - not anymore.

Myspace declined, at least for me, because it became a mess of spam and horribly excessive customization. Facebook is taking the opposite route. It's rapidly decreasing its own value through restriction of its services to a program that hosts navel-gazing status messages and a few time-wasting games. Such a big, feature rich site has shockingly little payoff. Odd how that works.

Interesting. It seems if they did things like that, they would be treating their TOS similar to some sort of a legal contract, and hopefully that would never hold up in court if they tried it.

All terms of service are intended to be a legal contract. You theoretically agree to them when you sign up for Facebook (I believe Facebook's TOS have also always included a clause saying that you agree to future changes such as the ones everyone is talking about). Whether a court will enforce them or not is another question, though.

@Ubik2501: I have a feeling if anything did come of a dispute between facebook and someone, that mandatory arbitration clause would be found almost immediately unconscionable

Aren't they only saying that if you're on there, you will leave a footprint that won't be erased? e.g. a comment by you won't be erased from your friends profile if you cancel your account??? I don't see what the big deal is.

@philmin: Nothing... yet. It's the perpetual license claim that is causing issues. As a Graphic Designer I take issue with the fact that they can take any of my images and use them with no recompense to me. Zuckerberg said they wouldn't use the info in anyway we wouldn't want. Fine, put that in writing.

On a side note, that facebook group has almost tripled in size since last night. Last I checked it was at 10k, now it's just shy of 30k.

@themicah:

Right, I guess I was alluding to the suggestion that Facebook might actually start selling your content elsewhere. The legality of the TOS as "contract" would falter because they would have given you no compensation whatsoever for goods you have "legally" given them. Which is against one of the fundamentals of a legal contract.

Think of the Children! The Children! Their memories and photo identiy...used to amass evil by the corporation known as Facebook!

I will tell my beautiful friends to take down their photos, for Facebook can use their souls for profit.

Fack you Facebook...you used to be the least obnoxious alternative to Myspace...

Everybody should start taking their profile picture and place a big black circle over their faces with the headline "Facebook don't take my face!"

This new TOS kinda sucks... but the sad part is that, unlike when they change a cell phone contract or the terms of your credit card, it seems you have no right to opt-out under the old terms. And, of course, there's arbitration... ugh....

That said, I don't personally think that Facebook will do anything really out of line with my data, but a change in the TOS to clarify things would be greatly appreciated.

@chris_l:

If they did make "Douchebags of Facebook" that would be a very, very thick book. Think of just how many frat boys with stunner shades and popped collars there are on facebook! Oh, the humanity!

How does Facebook's TOS compare to Consumerist's ???

While we can all bemoan the Facebook grabby-ness, why is the Consumerist TOS pretty much exactly the same, with the perpetual-ness and the irrevocable-ness and everything?

@chris_l: Perhaps kinda scummy, but are you getting clients because Facebook let you connect with them? Where's Facebook's cut in all the services they provide to you?

@chris_l:

I'm glad you brought this up. I'm a former war correspondent and photographer and I've uploaded a ton of my portfolio onto facebook. Now I might be taking it down.

@Matt Soreco: No, they're saying that anything you post can be used for them for any reason whatsoever, in any form they chose, in any venue they want, ignoring any privacy settings you've placed, for their profit, without payment to you, for ever and ever.

@philmin: It's not so simple. A contract doesn't require compensation, but "consideration", which can take many forms (monetary compensation being only one). In the case of Facebook, they are providing you with services to display your uploaded content, so they could argue that those services are the consideration they provided for the content you "gave" them. I'm not saying that argument would win in court, but it's not a bad argument.

@rhombopteryx:
the consumerist is a publication you are contributing to, for all to see.
Facebook on the other hand, is a private/semi-private site. That you compose your personal works and store personal/private works/photos. By having a private site to keep in communication with friends and family, Facebook's new TOS says they can take this private info and use it for any of their purposes.
Kind of like if you had a personal/private file storage you used to store files for your work, but the hosting company says by making this storage, they can steal your work for their company, making millions without giving you any credit or money and there is nothing you can do about it.

http://www.yorkietalk.com kept my dogs pictures last year even though I asked them to delete/remove them but the Admin said it was theirs now and that I checked OK when I signed up. {You agree that YorkieTalk owns the server(s) that you post messages or pictures on and that YorkieTalk may do whatever they wish with their servers. You agree that anything you write or post or reveal on YorkieTalk will only be deleted or removed at YorkieTalk's discretion. You agree that any posts or threads that are on YorkieTalk may be deleted or edited by YorkieTalk moderators or administrators at any time for any reason.} Sadly my pictures are now their property. All I wanted was my pictures removed!

I posted a note on facebook saying:

"By accepting this comment, facebook and all relevant related entities hereby agree to negate and revoke all the terms specified in [consumerist post about the changes], including arbitration and usage of original content. All content posted on this site by me is now under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Also, by accepting this comment, facebook now owes me a pony."

worth a shot.

@rhombopteryx:
Additionally, while I expect my posts to the consumerist to be published openly, and expect the Consumerist to have discretion to moderate and remove offensive or abusive posts, I do not upload photos, files, schedules, or other highly personal items. In fact Rhombopteryx, as your account name implies, you have a relative degree of anonymity.

In medical businesses, there is the concept of PHI, personal health information which, legally, may be used in the aggregate after any personally identifying data is removed (name, SSN, DOB, ...). Posts on Consumerist do not include personal information unless someone is very explicitly wanting to spread it (Hi, my name is Bob, call me at 555-1212.) And I suspect if that were the case, the Consumerist would, though would not be obligated to, remove said post.

Facebook is almost entirely personal information. It is a repository of so much personal information that there is a big legal distinction between it and the momentarily inspired posts of anonymous strangers.

Having railed against these TOS in several posts, however, I see one aspect in favor of Facebook which I have not heard discussed.

When you share your personal information to friends, then those friends share it you are already out of the equation. You don't necessarily know to whom and how your information is shared. Facebook is the conduit of many of those second-hand sharing transactions. Facebook must have language to protect itself from liability there.

But the blanket 3-year-old language 'it's mine, all mine' paired with the assurance of adult circumspection is completely unacceptable. The notion they could not craft better language to properly limit their behavior to match their stated 'intent' is ludicrously unbelievable.

@rhombopteryx: A good example is when the editors take a comment with a little nugget of wisdom hidden in some other post, and make a new post that expands on the idea. They might see someone posting in a Tipping thread about a cool method to divide up the bill, and turn it into a separate post, for example.

In that context, those sorts of clauses make sense. However, I'm not really seeing the facebook situation as analogous to that.

@wgrune:

You HAVE seen Hotchickswithdouchebags.com right? Who knows, it may BE a facebook product!

@philmin: People think their vacation/party photos are worth something. Not really a story here.

Any professional artist (and by that, I mean people who make their living with their craft) who puts their work up on the internet for all to see is asking people to take their images and store them away. Because that's exactly what happens when people view the page: that artwork gets saved in the user's cache, on their machine.

I remember way back when the web first started. All sorts of people wanted to know how to make it so that people could view an image but not save it. And it can't be done. Sorry.

If you don't want people to have your artwork, don't put it on the net. Plain and simple. And if you really think that those pictures you took with your point-and-shoot in Yosemite are worth something, please come back down to earth and join the rest of us rational people.

@GenXCub:

I saw the book at a Barnes and Noble the other day. Great read.

There is a big difference in putting copyrighted material online and having people rip it off and facebook saying "We have a legal right to your stuff." One means that you can sue and possibly recover damages for using your material. The other you are screwed.

So yah, most of you don't ever post anything that would be ever published, but the thing is you never know what will be valuable in media. Sometimes pop culture heads off in some strange directions and it would suck to miss out on the opportunity to profit from it.

I'll be leaving Facebook sometime soon. >.> Facebook has millions on dollars to higher lawyers to write that thing, and yet it comes out like that. That just doesn't jive with me.

@Matt Soreco:
They are not specifying that. That's exactly the problem. Their TOS is so vague that it can apply to almost anything. If they only specify that your comments and other things that you post on a friend's wall will not be deleted when you delete your account, then the problem is greatly reduced.

@wgrune: @1stMarDiv: Read the FB's TOS closely: your images are already archived in their databases. Even if you remove your photos from your account, your photos are still archived anyway and FB already owned the right to them. If you delete your account with all of your contents removed, FB still have them anyway. We got screwed by insidious, greedy lawyers hired by Facebook.

@metaled: Because this site can, of course, do no wrong. Give it up.

maybe its the price one has to pay for uploading your art, music, photos for free. i recalll geocities did this a long time ago. first they were free, got millions of users and then claimed that they had inlimited rights to use whatever you posted. its just a matter of time before other free networking sites follow suit. on one hand, you wnt the exposure of getting your music out to the masses and maybe getting a career out of it, but is it worth a corporation being able to use whatever you posted to promote themselvews and not have to pay you substantially for it? i did not post onto flickr for a long time because i thought they'd like geocities, but supposedly they are not...but they could be at some point. also if companies change policies like that, i feel their members should be given more warning. there should be more publicity about it so all members know and then the new policy can only go into effect the following year, not the next week or month. that gives members lots of time to completely delete their account if they want to so the company can't have any access to their posts.

@wee0x1B: It's not about not letting people see your artwork; it's about not letting people make commercial use of your artwork. There's a big difference.

@Mike Min:

Done. Thanks for the idea.

I knew there was a reason why I stayed away from facebook. One might not think it is a problem (the TOS), but really WHY would they want "perpetual" rights to YOUR images and thoughts? Sinister reasons, I'm sure. Let the posters beware. Thank you for giving folks the heads up!

@infinitemonkeys:

As previously mentioned in the Consumerist's update to their original blog on Facebook. The TOS are trumped by any privacy settings. Therefore, your content will be kept just as private as you intend it to be.

The TOS on Facebook are no different than the Consumerist's and many other websites. This is the status quo that law teams and departments draw up today.

As an aside, at least the beacon on Facebook's site can be disabled. No such luck on the Consumerist's website.

So since the link is dead and Google can't find it anywhere else -- zillions of links to it but not the article itself -- where can I read this?

@Geekybiker:

Facebook's TOS clearly state under the copyright/ownership section that User's still maintain copyright over their content. The changes to their TOS being discussed occurred under the Licensing section and has to deal with just that: licenses. Don't mistake copyright and licensing as the same thing.

some of the comments on here are absolutely hilarious. facebook publishing a book of its members photos? that is not just hilarious, its ridiculous.

For some reason the link to Amanda French's blog leads to a standard GoDaddy landing page.

@wireddeals: i was about to post the same comment about the misdirected link to GoDaddy as well.

@YasashikuAstypalaea: And I maintain that for every 100,000 "artists" who have their knickers in a knot over the (incredibly remote) possibility that someone might want to use their image commercially, only one guy has ever had it happen to him.

The chances that someone is going to make any appreciable money from your not-so-professional image taken from facebook are so remote as to be incalculable.

People place far too great a value on their photos. Because there are more photos more easily available than ever before, every picture you put up -- assuming it's of professional quality to begin with -- makes finding that photo harder and harder and therefore less likely to be stolen. It's a needle in a stack of needles. Nobody used to go wading through the photo processing places to find pictures they could steal from you. Nobody's doing that on facebook.

People's pics aren't that good, so even if they were easy to come across, why would someone want them? It's that sort of hubris which makes the licensing deal hilarious to me. Nobody wants your pictures of your cat or that mountain you saw on vacation, pal. Really. You just aren't that great a photographer, your camera likely sucks, the subject matter wasn't shot properly, and you have absolutely zero to worry about as far as any misappropriation.

Now having said that, if it's original artwork then that's a different story. If it's something that took actual work and actual skill to make, then I can see why it'd be worth taking the time and effort to find and steal. So then back to my original point: If you value it, don't put it online. (Or watermark the hell out of it, whatever.)

To be honest, most artists have an over-inflated sense of their own skills and the value of what they create anyway. But I'll concede the point if it's something which required time to create.

Holy shit, this article got featured on CNN minutes ago. Great job, Consumerist!

@wireddeals: I had the same problem. What a pain.

@OliveNipperkin: "License" just means "permission" to use copyrighted material for private or commercial reasons, usually temporary or limited in scope. "Perpetual License" means that permission is extended forever. Thus a Perpetual License essentially negates the copyright of the material wrt to the licensee, in this case, Facebook.

just found the correct link to amanda french's article

[amandafrench.net]

@AndyMan1: I did the same thing at my facebook account. I know Cory Doctorow wrote about doing something similar in an EULA last year. *crosses fingers*

@wee0x1B:
Actually, it's quite easy to prevent people from saving images. Photoshop allows you to copy-protect an image, preventing your average day-to-day user from being able to download from a website. You could also save them as Flash to prevent the saving of images.