Facebook TOS Change: All Your Stuff is Ours, Even if You Quit
mashable.com
mashable.com
It would be an interesting bit of performance art for someone to delete their facebook account and then file a DMCA takedown notice if they could show that their profile pic was still available within facebook.
Let's see if they respect my IP rights.
I wouldn't doubt if governments will be forcing FB and other social networking sites to retain data for several years to help in any police or terrorism investigations.
Just metainformation that is. When?, From where?, To where?, (if applicable) Who? but (so far) never What?.
The problem is that facebook is still bleeding money. Once they go belly-up, all their assets will be sold to the highest bidder, and the world largest collection of stock photos will likely be among the most valuable of them.
I have serious problems with "irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense)".
Not likely. More likely is that someone that has deep pockets and lives in Redmond purchases them for something like 2X (8 billion).
Governments being governments, they'd likely throw good money after bad. They might also feel, having gotten everyone in one central database, that Facebook is "too big to fail".
Citation, please?
http://www.iqt.org/technology-portfolio/index-alphabetical.h...
Given how comprehensive it is, I'd be very surprised if In-Q-Tel was all cutesy and shady about an investment in Facebook (a company that doesn't meet their objectives in any way).
Accel is another VC company who's board members overlap with In-Q-Tel. From: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5...
The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies".
Breyer also served on the board of R&D firm BBN Technologies, which was one of those companies responsible for the rise of the internet.
Dr Anita Jones joined the firm, which included Gilman Louie. She had also served on the In-Q-Tel's board, and had been director of Defence Research and Engineering for the US Department of Defence.
Anyway, I'm not saying Facebook is "big brother". I just think DoD is interested in advanced data mining and prediction capabilities. Also, they're interested in recruiting through Facebook, but that's entirely unrelated.
Facebook can't really sell the content unless they can prove the person who uploaded it had the writes to distribute it. Which you can't do in an automated fashion.
But guess what? An overwhelming majority of people on Facebook aren't concerned with data mining activities, there are families on Facebook. People who connect with loved ones overseas, who don't want their photos and family memories saved on the Internet for the sake of technical operation.
Really. Look at it from their perspective: they do-not-care about code and crunching processes. To them, this is akin to a gov't wiretapping phones in the name of national preservation.
Also I have an issue with the article:
> Someone can still take your photo, slap it on Facebook, and now neither you nor the author of the photo can stop Facebook from using the photo in whichever way they please.
I doubt that that's the case. If someone takes something to which I have a copyright and then places it on Facebook without my approval, I would think I have legal recourse. Isn't this what a DMCA takedown notice is for? Unless I'm misreading that quote.
Facebooks ToS explicitly state that they respect the IP rights of others and that they will remove any infringing content, or for repeat offenders their account will permanently be suspended (presumably their email will be banned too). It also says they do everything in accordance with the DMCA. The one thing people don't understand about the DMCA is that whilst it might be evil, it also protects individuals as much as companies because every single photo, sentence or anything you or I make or write are immediately copy protected in all western countries.
1. Warning: Wrong conflation detected. DMCA != copyright
2. Warning: Wrong conflation detected. copyright != "copy protected" (copyleft = copyright, copyleft = "copy invited")
3. DMCA is neither universal nor universal to western countries. It's actually no universal to anything. Just an internal USA law.
Moreover, the subjects of photos can sue you for invasion of privacy -- or, depending on how you use the image, slander. Property owners can sue you for trespassing. And, in some parts of some countries, there is a "right of publicity":
http://www.publaw.com/rightpriv.html
... which prevents you from (e.g.) taking a photo of a well-known person, Photoshopping your product into their hands, and using the result for commercial purposes.
The end result is that professional photographers, videographers, and filmmakers try to get signed release forms from every recognizable person who appears in a shot that is to be used for a commercial purpose. [2] The documented existence of those release forms is a major reason why stock photos cost more than your brother's photographs of random pedestrians on the street.
---
[1] Have I mentioned in this thread that I'm not a lawyer? I'm not a lawyer.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/terms.php
I see it continues to include the phrase "subject only to your privacy settings" as Facebook asserts what it can do with your content. Now I wonder if that is as much of a problem as Facebook asserting it will not respect your privacy settings at all (which would be very worrisome indeed).
I see my reply below asking about this was read for the literal meaning of the too-brief words, rather than for my intended implication. My bad, for not being more clear. What I was trying to introduce to the learned discussion here is the idea that Facebook says, even after its revision to its ToS, that it will respect your privacy settings. So, if you have used the Facebook features to set your privacy setting so that only friends, or only a subset of friends, see most of your submitted content (as I did immediately upon signing up for Facebook), is this ToS change really that much of a worry? If you know how to set your Facebook privacy settings, and like the effect of those settings, the only people who have access to your submitted content are the same people to whom you have already shown it, right?
"Your best friend just got dumped by his cheating finance...brought to you by Carl's Jr." will not go over as well as Carl's Jr. intended.
But it is pretty interesting how they microtarget ads. I've seen my staunch republican friend login to facebook. She gets ads like "Do you feel the election was stolen? Voice your thoughts here."
Where as I get ads indie rock music sites and student loan "bail outs".
There's one thing about this that confuses me: with a change like this to the ToS, why didn't they alert me and make me confirm that I agree with the new terms?
And if you're using Facebook now, you should be okay with the change because it's not like much has actually changed with regard to how FB is going to use/sell your data.
No need to have anything more in it.
Nope. Not ironic.
Although... Mark Zuckerberg could have been eavesdropping with his ear to the wall, been shocked by what he heard, and just changed the company strategy to do whatever it took to make you happy again. Then it might be ironic!
Which is just an excuse to bring up http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT1TVSTkAXg.
I noticed something about using the "Share" link, but I don't know if that's considered the same thing.
Appreciate the insight!
Has anyone read MS Windows EULA?
EDIT:
* Facebook has millions of users, its TOS allows it to do anything with your data. If you don't accept the TOS you can't use the service.
* MS Windows has millions of users, its EULA allows it to do anything with your data. If you don't accept the EULA you can't use the OS.
The question is not about MS. I've picked Windows because it has a huge user base.
My initial statement is equivalent to: if you take any software product that has many users then its legal docs effectively leave no rights to the end users. So it is not a big deal when Facebook changes its docs accordingly.
I understand that software companies are forced to adopt such policies to survive.
Therefore I rely on MS' good will that it tests updates before it releases them to the general public (even if it breaks all Windows boxes one day, people will be using it anyway).
For example, I don't care how copyright law applies to this comment, but I don't want it to be deleted for no reason otherwise why I'm writing it.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/terms.php
do for users? How do you set your privacy settings on Facebook?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482772
links to a different Web source, so not exactly a duplicate. Just a hot new story.