Wake Up to How You Share on the Web | chrisbrogan.com
What Facebook is saying, and they have to, is that they have to own your stuff, because if Facebook Connect and other services are going to make your data ubiquitous and shared and spread all around like peanut butter, then they have to have the rights to republish and distribute it. (I might have this a bit wrong. I’m willing to be a bit wrong.)
via Wake Up to How You Share on the Web | chrisbrogan.com.
Here’s one of those places where language can trip you up, and which may be part of the problem with the Facebook TOS.
Facebook doesn’t need to own your content. It may need to retain the rights to keep a copy of it for certain purposes — but ownership implies a much different set of requirements.
“ownership” implies they control future use of the item, that they are now “in charge”. In reality, what Facebook needs to be working towards is a non-exclusive usage license. There’s a huge gulf between OWN (“all rights”) and a non-exclusive license. What Facebook needs to be aiming for is the recognition that once you share something, it’s practically impossible to unshare it, so they need to maintain rights to maintain those shared versions of things in perpetuity. But they can still make explicit that once you delete “the original” their right to create new shared copies ends. They should commit that when you chose to stop sharing, they’ll stop allowing new copies or instances to be created.Technically could be a bit interesting, but do-able.
The other aspect, the one that seems to have is their use of things for marketing. At one level, this is understandable – if only because when you do screen shots, god knows what content is going to be in there, and faking all of the content looks bad. But – there needs to be real clarity of how and in what forms this will and won’t be used. The lawyer-friendly “forever and however we feel lik eusing it, including selling CD’s of stock photography to chinese brothels” doesn’t work, even if it allows lawyers to sleep well at night. Lawyers covering all possible bases shouldn’t be the primary goal of the TOS, however, right?
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