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)".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?.