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

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.