The kids at Facebook have a problem on their hands. It appears that, as unbelievable as it may seem, some users actually read the Terms of Use.
The salient part reads,
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.
In short, when you post anything to Facebook, you give them the right to do whatever they want with it. Forever.
Facebook’s response has been laughable. They claim to need all these rights to provide the service. Nonsense. And, while making his feeble excuses, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, used the magic words, ‘Trust us’.
As exotic dancing legend Blaze Star’s mama told her, as she boarded the bus out of Twelve Pole Creek to seek her fortune as a ‘preformin’ artiste’, “Never trust a man who says, ‘Trust me’.”
I’m willing to bet that Zuckerberg’s employment contract doesn’t say ‘Trust us’, anywhere. Give us a break Mark. Do away with your ridiculous one-sided contract. Tell us how you’re really going to use our content. Or maybe that’s the point. Maybe you don’t want us to know.
Evolving Squid
I’d say that a more accurate description might be that people look at the terms of use, reading it, well not so much.
>>In short, when you post anything to Facebook, you give
>>them the right to do whatever they want with it. Forever.
That’s not what it says by any measure. If they tried to take that position in court, they’d lose to the first person who showed up with a dictionary.
“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,…”
That’s pretty clear – when you delete your content, they can no longer do whatever they want with it.
“… however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.”
Retaining archive copies and exercising the rest of those licence rights are not equivalent. Yes, they are saying they have rights to keep their backups forever. That’s NOT the same as saying they can use the information how they want forever. It makes sense too… there’s no realistic way they can go back through all their backups to delete the stuff you delete. The first 100 people to delete things would bankrupt the company if they did that.
If they try to take the latter interpretation (use the archives as licenced content forever), they’ll be pimp slapped by the first person brave enough to take them on with a semi-competent lawyer.
To achieve the “all things forever” language they’d need to have some kind of terms that indicate that the licence to the content is not revoked on the archive copies. They don’t say that.