Zuck's Official Comment: On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information | Hacker News Reader

Zuck's Official Comment: On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information

blog.facebook.com

"When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message."

Ok, but that does not mean that Facebook actually has to retain ownership of your information if you leave the site, right? The friend you sent this message to could have ownership of this piece of information - if Facebook wanted to structure it this way. That is actually how email works. It seems like a pretty weakly structured argument.

Maybe the most meaningful and straightforward part of the article: "we're going to make some missteps"

Furthermore, this kind of statement is a bit vague. What other ways is information duplicated in a way that is reasonable to Facebook? The example they provide would be seen as acceptable to most, but what if general site operations require duplication and retention that is not?

So I guess technically they should have some kind of a reference count. Once you and all your friends with which you shared a specific image or message or whatever leaves, they should let all rights lapse. That would be the right way to do it, at least.

I think a mark and sweep algorithm on the information would be a better strategy

So I guess technically they should have... a reference count.

Okay, wise guys: Show me the algorithm that finds the snippet of ojbyrne's writing that I've just copied, above, and deletes it when ojbyrne deletes the original message. ;)

Now show me the version which correctly identifies my quote as a pretty obvious case of fair use, and therefore allows me to keep the quote even when the original is deleted.

No hacker would expect you to be able to do such a thing reliably. But the juries in copyright lawsuits are not composed of hackers.

git could do it ;)

The friend you sent this message to could have ownership of this piece of information - if Facebook wanted to structure it this way. That is actually how email works.

This is untrue. An email written by you is your copyrighted work, from the moment you type it. Just because it's in my inbox doesn't mean you've relinquished your copyright. Technically, if I republish your email to me, you can sue me. [1]

The other day someone was polite enough to ask for permission to republish one of my comments here on HN on their blog. That surprised me for a second, but it shouldn't have. They were doing the correct, legal thing -- my comment was (and is) copyrighted by me; unless they were reproducing it for a fair use -- as I just did, when I quoted your post for the purpose of commenting on it -- they needed my permission to reuse it.

Now imagine how useful Facebook would be if every user had to seek a copyright release from every other user anytime they forwarded a message, or cropped a fellow user's photo, or reposted something, lest Facebook later be sued for contributory or vicarious infringement. [2] That's why Facebook has now decided to just have users agree to a waiver in advance.

---

[1] Not that you would necessarily win such a lawsuit. There are such things as "implied licenses": If you send email to a public mailing list there's an implication that you mean for it to be public:

http://www.piercelaw.edu/thomasfield/ipbasics/copyright-on-t...

There are also many fair uses. But, especially if I use your writing for some sort of commercial purpose -- as Facebook does, constantly -- you can take me to court and hassle me, because the copyright is still yours. As the Creative Commons website will tell you at great length, under current US copyright law it's actually really hard to throw away the inherent copyright that you hold in your own work, even if you want to throw it away.

[2] http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise14.html

So when I click reply to an email, and preserves your entire text at the bottom of my reply, I'm guilty of copyright infringement? How about when I forward the school newsletter to the person the school meant to send it to?

Not infringement -- I'm pretty sure that both these use cases fall under the "implied license" case mentioned in the link I provided, above. And it's important to note that there's a big difference between using someone else's copyrighted material and copyright infringement. Don't be fooled by (e.g.) the music industry's attempt to confuse these two concepts.

There's also a difference between copyright infringement and an infringing act for which you will be prosecuted, convicted, and fined. There is necessarily a lot of leeway in copyright law, precisely because everything written today now falls under someone's nigh-permanent copyright.

(It used to be that, in the USA, you had to affix a copyright notice to a work to secure the copyright. That changed in 1989 when the US ratified the Berne Convention. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyrights)

"Technically, if I republish your email to me, you can sue me."

There are also long established exceptions to this. Many writers have got around this by publishing users emails in book simply by putting a clause stating something like 'by sending me an email you are agreeing that I have all legal rights to the work'. As long as you make it explicit then you can own someones email, however there's no explicit notices anywhere on FB that they have a right to any information you give.

But case law blurs in the context of Facebook.

I post an album of a friends drunken birthday party. I tag my friends. They start tagging their friends and commenting. Once people are interacting through my photos on facebook, the question comes down to who owns the interaction?

Since we have "weak" laws for dealing with this, or our existing laws just do not seem practical in the scope that Facebook transmits information globally, its probably the simplest means of getting around the legal framework: Assign ownership to the corporation, since you cannot fairly create a legal representative for each "network".

"Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with."

A philosophy is warm fuzzies, but the contract that is the TOS is what matters.

If you've never worked with lawyers on crafting a new TOS for a new kind of service, it can be easy to misconstrue the legal jargon to imply evil intentions. But likely it's just that they've identified where they need to be clear about what they can and can't do with the information you upload and share.

I haven't read the TOS thoroughly, and IANAL, but what Zuck says sounds perfectly reasonable as far as I can tell. They identified a particular nuance of their service (i.e. the fact that once you share something with people, they need to be able to display it for ever to whom you've shared it with) and need realised they need to cover themselves legally against it.

It strikes me as proactive and sensible arse covering in what is a hyper-litigious society.

If you've a problem with the TOS I believe it to be a problem with the unfortunate legal wrangling, that large companies face to protect themselves, not with some evil intention of FaceBook.

I'm not trying to impute evil motives to Facebook and I understand why they're doing this. I'm just pointing out that blog posts about philosophies are trumped by contracts and it's ridiculous for Zuckerberg to expect anyone to take his words seriously.

I take his words seriously: that their philosophy is to preserve contributor ownership.

But Zuck may not always be in charge (isn't completely now, for that matter). So his words ought not to be taken legally: i.e., they offer no protection to Facebookers from corporate decisions.

Exactly. Even if their current intent is good, they are stating something that can potentially be evil for their customers, and only that counts for lawyers.

The argument is: imagine they have financial difficulties and that Dogbert buys them to exploit our data...

once you share something with people, they need to be able to display it for ever to whom you've shared it with)

I am skeptical. Where I work, we're constantly dealing with these sorts of cases where current privacy settings don't quite match past sharing actions. If we can deal with these problems, so can Facebook.

I'm sure the lawyers wanted to have maximum rights solely to protect FB from insane lawsuits. It's not a nefarious plan to sell your drunken clubbing photos. But they failed to achieve balance here.

Where I work, we're constantly dealing with these sorts of cases

Is your user base the size of Facebook's?

There's a certain percentage of human beings who file insane lawsuits. The more users you have, the greater the odds that you will sample one of them. Become a large enough company, and you'll need an entire legal staff just to respond to each week's pile of new lawsuits.

"One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created--one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear."

So Zuckerberg's claim is that the change in the ToS just reflects the reality that information is stored with you and with your friends when you share information with your friends. Backing up his statement is that the new ToS

http://www.facebook.com/terms.php?ref=pf

still refers to "(i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof SUBJECT ONLY TO YOUR PRIVACY SETTINGS" (emphasis added). Maybe this isn't such a big worry after all, although I was alarmed at first by the blog posts announcing this ToS change.

Blogs like sensationalism - it's how they make money. They're not different from any other site.

First there was the whole newsfeed=evil deal, then there was the Facebook CIA thing, now it's the TOS. Anything that'll get a lot of paranoid people riled up.

If there were ever a time when we needed Lawrence Lessig to step up to the plate and go "Chill the fuck out, I got this", it's right now.

If there were ever a time when we needed Lawrence Lessig to step up to the plate

Are your legs broken or something? The man does a lot, and as he sometimes points out, very few people are also stepping up to that plate with him.

If they just need this for inbox messages, why don't they just expressly list that as the exception. I would be fine with that.

All i want to say really is slippery slope. I never hoped on the Facebook thing, even though I get that email spam from people I know who are on it every now and then. My main gripe was you could never actually delete your account, and now the business reports on the founders sister showing data mining, and now the change of the TOS. They are bleeding money they don't have just to keep the lights on. People may enjoy it, but even in a digital world, I prefer a modicum of privacy.

We are all pink and fluffy here so you have nothing to worry about, just relax and forget about it...

well why should another person get to keep your information when you are no longer using the site? Its just an excuse for FB to keep the data, because not having the missing comments etc won't be noticed anyways.

Say you post a picture of me, and I like it and use it for my profile picture. Then you leave Facebook. Now I have no profile picture.

Just the first example that popped into my head.

it isn't your photo to use, though.

You're right. Its Facebook's picture.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com