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Why I won’t publish on Facebook

Posted April 20th, 2009 in Geek and tagged , , , by HN

Let us all be scared a little. Here goes:

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.

(Emphasis and italics by me)

It is taken from the Facebook Terms of Use (as of today). Meaning they basically own whatever you ever published, and they can do whatever they want with it. I am no legal expert, so someone correct me if I am wrong. But this is what I gather from all the legalese.

Meaning I will host, publish, post, chat and generally hang around in my own personal nice little blog, and chose what I wish to share and what I don’t. Also meaning now I have to go read the TOU in Twitter, Flickr, Picasa et al. But better than freelancing for someone for free.

Read a fitting description of Media 2.0: “You create all the content, they make all the money.” Even though I am a marketer and am well versed with these business models, claiming rights of all content posted is pushing one’s luck a bit too far.

Update: Time to show Twitter some love :) I love the first sentence in their Copyright section: “What’s yours is yours.

Granted that there is a lot more ‘content’ in other social media compared to Twitter, it is still an important distinction in the approach to user-generated content.

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