Facebook: "We can do anything we want with your content. Forever"

http://consumerist.com/5150175/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can-do-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever

by manvsmachine • 17 years ago

83 56 17 years ago

pierrefar2• 17 years ago

Well that $15b valuation has to come from somewhere. What this says is they want to be a media company with millions of producers.

gaius5• 17 years ago

Facebook wants not to be sued if someone's boss sees something they shouldn't and fires that someone. That's the real reason for this policy. By uploading content to FB you absolve them of responsibility for whom they show it to.

Seriously, you think a million bad cameraphone pictures of people getting drunk are worth $15Bn?

pierrefar2• 17 years ago

I never said that, or more accurately, the sarcasm about them being a media company didn't come through in my sentence.

There is also the element of trust. What you describe is a sensible thing to protect against, but I have that gut feeling that the new policy is covering a new approach FB may take. Something feels wrong with having this wording of this policy, so I mistrust the intentions behind this new policy until evidence to the contrary emerges. I'm not holding my breath.

c00p3r• 17 years ago

The idea of make and sell trend and analytical reports is on the surface. At least they and google did it for 'internal' use.

thepanister• 17 years ago

Well... Facebook is not worth the $15b... but I think it was made just for propaganda purposes..

They wanted the press to keep a spot on Facebook!

Rod• 17 years ago

Would it be too far-fetched to claim that Facebook's evil terms of use create an opportunity for a new photo-sharing platform?

Facebook makes it very easy to share photos. What if one could still share photos with friends on Facebook, but these photos were not uploaded to Facebook's server?

mseebach• 17 years ago

A quick google reveals serveral Flickr for Facebooks apps.. but I think a major value-driver for photos on FB is tagging of friends, and the "see all photos of..", "see photos of NN and me" features, and I think those are difficult/impossible to tap into without using FB's own photo app (although I don't know).

An idea could be to make an app that will upload deliberately crippled (low resolution, watermark), yet recognizable, pictures to FB, and a high-quality copy on Flickr, so tags work, but when you go the to picture, there's a note "I won't let FB own my stuff, see a high quality version of this pic on (Flickr-link) that I own. Posted by CoolPhotoApp."..

unalone11• 17 years ago

If I was on Facebook and a friend of mine started doing that, I would unfriend him for being a dick. If he tagged me in a low-res picture, so that all my friends looking for my photos would see a blurry me in the mix, I'd be pretty pissed off. Or worse: I'd ban the application, as is my prerogative, and suddenly I don't see any of these photos at all and that app destroys photos entirely.

plesn8• 17 years ago

A non-evil social network would have to be distributed and based on open protocols: you could be @facebook.com but could interact with people on other networks so that users would have choice. They could even have their own server.

The net and the web were built like that, but now why are we building "jails" within the compelling interactivity of the "web 2.0"?

There are numerous interesting protocols to build upon (openid, the extensible XMPP..., etc..), and startups should use them and respect their users data. Concerning social networks there seem to be some alternatives (Elgg, OpenSocial APIs) but could a startup build something more open and still profitable on those?

gaius5• 17 years ago

The thing all those interesting protocols have in common is that they mean absolutely nothing to 99% of people who joined Facebook because that's where their friends were, that's where photos are tagged and event invites are sent from.

plesn8• 17 years ago

I totally agree. But that's called a situation of monopoly. Shouldn't we be able to have inpact on laws that would protect us, and enforce more transparency and more openned up interfaces?

mechanical_fish3• 17 years ago

Plus, distributed protocols are significantly harder to engineer. You have to design for the case where the remote provider of Function X isn't up, or doesn't scale, or will decide to hate you if you send it too much traffic. You have to formalize many APIs and fix them in stone, much earlier in the process than you otherwise would, because now you've got external services that will depend on those APIs and will break if you change them. This will tend to make big, open, distributed systems much less flexible and harder to evolve over time.

When you combine that with the fact that most customers just don't care -- not until after they've got a lot invested in your site, at which point you're probably already a big success -- it's not surprising that the sites which evolved into big winners did so by keeping themselves fairly insular. Why spend money and time developing features that aren't important?

I'm not holding out hope for distributed versions of things like Facebook. Not yet. It's not unimaginable that the user community will eventually embrace such things, after they've had a lot more training in the downside of walled gardens, but I think we're way too early in the Web 2.0 adoption cycle for that. Right now I'd settle for a baby step: An export API that lets you dump all your data out of a service in some sort of JSON or XML format. That would be unusable for 99% of people, but at least it would let them back up their data and hand it to some third party that might be able to read it for them.

alabut• 17 years ago

"now why are we building "jails" within the compelling interactivity of the "web 2.0"?"

Usability. Take a look at the Yahoo research on OpenID for an example of just one standard:

http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/10/open_id_res...

Asking why people are flooding Facebook is a great question, one that often doesn't get asked by geeks, probably because we assume the problem is simple human flocking behavior and people herding towards where the rest of their friends hang out. Nope, that's a necessary but insufficient condition - why did that crowd form in the first place? Just try using myspace for a day and it's painfully obvious.

eru• 17 years ago

Email?

Harkins• 17 years ago

<i>why are we building "jails"</i>

Easier to make money with a walled garden than encouraging agriculture.

CalmQuiet• 17 years ago

Well, it's a natural power grab. If you can grab it, why not: who knows what financial benefits may appear later.

Some day a 21st Century "Diary of Ann Frank" might start with notes made on FB. Won't FB want to take advantage of print/advert/movie rights. $$$

"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

jacquesm• 17 years ago

they may want it and they may claim they've got it but I highly doubt it would fly. The manufacturer of the paper you write on does not get to claim copyright, you do.

zzkt• 17 years ago

Did you actually read the terms of service?

trickjarrett• 17 years ago

I want to understand the legal structure that allows this. The TOS I agreed to most certainly did not agree to the permanent control of this data. Why am I now bound to this new one?

jerf2• 17 years ago

The TOS that you did sign almost certainly contained a clause that said something to the effect of "You further agree that we may make any change to these terms in the future, and you will continue to be bound by them."

If that bothers you, bad news: Damn near every contract you sign nowadays contains that clause.

The better terms of service will permit you to at least cancel the contract after a term change if you do not consent. My CC contract had that, and I bet it's because it's required by law. But I haven't seen that many other places.

Now, this might sound like a horrible clause. And it probably is. On the other hand, contracts have a real need to be mutable, and for something like the Facebook TOS, you're basically dealing with millions of parties to the contract that simply can't be meaningfully "informed" about the nature of the contract or the nature of the changes. So, it's not just a problem with evil, greedy companies, it's also a problem with the fact that people are essentially incapable of understanding the TOS (due to either time or a literal inability to comprehend) and our legal system simply requires some sort of TOS to exist. The problem is complex and does not admit a simple solution.

Retric• 17 years ago

They can say what they want but such changes to the contract is not enforceable in the US. If you sign up and they change the TOS you can use the old TOS and force them to remove your account.

greyboy3• 17 years ago

I disagree.

Facebook has one of the easiest, and certainly cheapest, methods to inform users of new TOS agreements. In contrast to your CC company, they don't have to physically mail an updated document. If the TOS change, the user can simply be presented the new terms upon logging in (the next login after the change, or course), and they have the opportunity to agree to the new terms or not. This is how some sites have tackled this problem in my own experience.

If they wanted to be really fancy, they could even highlight where the changes are via change bars or text formatting. I wouldn't expect that, however.

mechanical_fish3• 17 years ago

Would it spoil the party to point out that Facebook's original terms of service were insane? [1] That they promised something that Facebook was unable to deliver? They allowed you to post content to Facebook, wait until that content was quoted, copied, pasted, or remixed by others, then pull the content off and sue Facebook if any of those quotations, copies, or remixes persisted anywhere on Facebook's site. Ask the MPAA how well that would have worked out for you in practice.

We all know that removing something which has been posted to the web is like removing the proverbial drop of food coloring from a swimming pool. With their new TOS, Facebook is stating something that's been true all along: They're running a swimming pool. Once your content is exposed to its userbase you can't take that content back.

I am reminded of a passage in J. Michael Straczynski's screenwriting book where he talks about how important it is to avoid sending unsolicited manuscripts to movie or TV producers. They will send the manuscripts back unopened [2] and refuse to deal with you again, because:

One individual I encountered had written a spec Terminator 3 script, hoping to either send it to producer James Cameron and later sue Cameron because this person was sure this would be the next story or tempt Cameron to sue him, which would force Cameron to read the script, after which he would be so thoroughly blinded by the script's brilliance that he'd buy it instantly. (No, I'm not making this up.)... Unsolicited manuscripts are the constant nightmare of any producer.

Perhaps Facebook has become large and old enough to have had its first encounter with such a copyright troll. The solution to this problem, as employed by every producer in Hollywood, is to require a release form before you'll read anything.

---

[1] Note that I am not a lawyer. The lawyers in the audience are welcome to explain that I'm wrong.

[2] "It will be returned in a larger envelope, unopened (although there will often be a tiny tear in one of the corners of the original envelope, made by a secretary to verify that it contained a script)." -- JMS

plesn8• 17 years ago

What you're pointing here, is that even a "non-evil" company can nearly be forced by the sake of self-protection and simplicity to have abusive clauses. Maybe this shows the need of active regulation and arbitration in the domain.

In France we have somthing supposed to ensure data privacy called "CNIL" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNIL ). Is there some equivalent in the US?

mechanical_fish3• 17 years ago

I don't think we're talking about a data privacy issue here. Facebook's TOS, old and new, states that its rights to use your data are "subject to your privacy settings". The issue here is copyright, which is not the same thing.

Meanwhile, if you're saying that it would be great if we had a regulatory regime that recognized the reality of the Internet -- where anything you publish effectively belongs to the world and cannot thereafter be retracted or centrally controlled -- amen to that! But that's not the world we live in. We live in a world full of lawyers who mail C&D notices to indie filmmakers if they happen to photograph a building or a sign or a person without getting a signed release first; a world where a lot of modern art can't afford to legally exist because it costs too much to clear the rights to all the components of that art. Under those circumstances, I find it hard to blame Facebook for throwing up their hands and demanding a waiver before you publish anything on their platform.

TweedHeads2• 17 years ago

Like Firefox did, just create an open source social experience and we will move our friends and family to a more open and secure place.

Never underestimate an angry customer...

unalone11• 17 years ago

TweedHeads, it's really cute that you think that's why people went to Firefox, the whole open thing, but the average user doesn't know what plugins are. The big switch to FF came when it had tabs and IE 6 didn't. That's when I changed. It also rendered pages more accurately and loaded faster than IE 6. Nobody cares that it was open, and chances are people didn't care that it was secure. The idea of security is that you don't actively notice it.

Facebook is secure already, and nobody cares that it's closed. If it was a shitty site that was also closed, then maybe an "open social experience" would come in handy, but Facebook also happens to be the best-designed popular site that's ever been made, it runs oily-smooth, and it has five hundred bazillion users.

Never underestimate an angry customer...

Like the 10 million angry customers that protested when Facebook redesigned and lost its little guy logo? Or that protested that you can't change Facebook to other colors? Because I have friends that joined those groups, and they're still on Facebook. "Mildly irritated" customers can be underestimated, for the most part. They don't do anything.

TweedHeads2• 17 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485460

Never underestimate an angry customer...

lgriffith• 17 years ago

The Cloud absorbs all. Once you live there, your life becomes one with the Cloud. You no longer belong to you. The only answer is never to have joined the Cloud. It is already too late. Resistance is futile.

indigoviolet2• 17 years ago

Facebook's response: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54434097130

Facebook: "We can do anything we want with your content. Forever"

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