It's all about the timing

[brynndragon]

NPR is doing a piece on "the benefits of joining Facebook" on Talk of the Nation (starts now, not sure when in the next hour they'll be discussing that subject). Any bets for how long it'll take for someone to point out their recent "We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever." changes to the ToS?

ETA: It was the first question the host asked, before they went to the phones. He did the standard "oh, it's just so Facebook doesn't have to keep track of things you put on friends' walls to make it go away when you delete your account". Someone should tell them that using legalese to make up for lazy coding is not cool.

Comments

[lawbard.livejournal.com]

Well, thats a BS excuse in my opinion.

That legalese, to me, means that anything on Facebook becomes their legal property, meaning they can do whatever they want with it, including sell it, and you have little to no recourse with how they handle it. They own it...you do not.

And thats so excessively horrifying that I will never have anything to do with Facebook, ever.

[brewergnome.livejournal.com]

I'm going to *have* to remove stuff, and may just close my account, since I don't have the rights to give people the rights to some of my photos on there.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's going to be a very lovely lawsuit when a photographer sues Facebook because they play the "sell user's stuff" game and pick a picture that the *user* didn't have the rights to. Frickin' asshats.

[brewergnome.livejournal.com]

My problem is that *I* have rights to them, but they were TFP so I don't have rights to give/sell them.

I actually need to email one of the photographers to see if I can retroactively buy one of the photos.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Yes, I should have specified the rights being "sell/give away" rather than "use".

[brewergnome.livejournal.com]

::grumbles::

It's annoying.

[brewergnome.livejournal.com]

Especially since they're lying out their asses. It's so they can pull things like using your photos in ads, which they got in a shit-ton of trouble for last time.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Yea, I'd go delete my account, but how would that help?

[brewergnome.livejournal.com]

I don't know. I may just because I don't want to go through my photos to remove the ones I can't let them have even if I wanted to.

[unseelie.livejournal.com]

delete profile NOW NOW NOW
i think new Terms apply monday(IE a few days)
consumerist.com for details
or google the discussion

Weirdness

[pezzonovante.livejournal.com]

I get in my car to go to the bank, and this is the first thing I hear.

"[static] ... the virtual contract you sign when you create your profile. The new terms state that Facebook can use ..."

Re: Weirdness

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Yea, separate pieces on the new Facebook ToS showed up on both Day to Day and All Things Considered, after the Talk of the Nation show. But the net conclusion always seemed to be "It's not really that bad, y'all are over-reacting". Feh.

ETA: IANAL, but you are. Facebook claims their new ToS does *not* mean they own everything ever. Is that correct, or is the original interpretation closer to the truth? And what do I owe you for an answer? ;P

Re: Weirdness

[pezzonovante.livejournal.com]

I'm not a lawyer yet, so I can't give professional advice, so you get what you pay for.

I hadn't actually read over the agreement. There are a few things in that agreement that puzzle me, but not in the parts people are complaining about.

First, I think Facebook people are right to point that a license to use != ownership. There's a really important distinction that people who've seen the movie Wayne's World should be familiar with. When Wayne and Garth threatened to walk over the shows commercialization, Lowe said they couldn't because "we own the show." If Lowe merely had a "irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense)", Wayne and Garth could have walked and started their show again. Ownership means Facebook can exclude your use of the relevant stuff. A license just means you both have the right to use it.

Second, people are right to suggest that the agreement seems really broadly worded. If I were drafting that agreement to achieve their stated goals, I would have left the Termination clause that was deleted in tact, but limited it only to material that other users do not have editorial control over and content not sent to specific users or into public or private groups. It seems to be more in line with the claims Facebook is making about the significance of removing the termination clause without leaving all this 'sky is falling' feeling among Facebook users.

Last and most important point. In making these public explanations of the reasons for the alteration, Facebook could be binding themselves to those meanings as a matter of law. There's a doctrine called the Parole Evidence Rule, which says (partly) that statements outside of the contract that purports to explain the modification of an existing agreement can be considered by the court in interpreting the contract's meaning. With all these public statements claiming that "No, the new version doesn't mean what you think it means", it could have the effect of limiting the literal change in the contract to the meaning they've been claiming.

Re: Weirdness

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Thank you for writing that up. I definitely agree that your last point is the most important, especially since it is the least obvious (to me at least). I deleted my Facebook photo album (I might have to get a Flickr account once I read their ToS, I hear you can have your stuff under the Creative Commons license which would be fine by me) and the only other thing I'm worried about is contact info, which entirely consists of the e-mail account I use when I think it might get spam. So I feel reasonably OK with it for now.

[pockethedgehog.livejournal.com]

And this is exactly why I don't put anything really interesting or important online unless (a) it is on a site I do not control and there is some way for me to also put a copyright or creative commons license on it, or (b) I control the site, or directly know the person who does.

[pockethedgehog.livejournal.com]

Oh, also, Facebook just posted this:

"A couple of weeks ago, we posted an update to our Terms of Use that we hoped would clarify some parts of it for our users. Over the past couple of days, we have received a lot of questions and comments about these updated terms and what they mean for people and their information. Because of the feedback we received, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised."

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

That's worth it's own post - thanks!