The Blank Page

@Colleen_Lindsaytweeted a link a little earlier to a post on her blog, which can be found here. If you’re a Facebook user, you really should read it.

Essentially, what it says is that Facebook’s new TOS (as of Feb 4th) grants them unequivocal subrights to anything and everything you post on their site, and they reserve the right to sell those subrights at their discretion. It also states that, even if you permanently delete your account or content, they have it stored and still retain the same rights as if it were still live on the site. That’s a whole heck of a lot different than their old TOS which had a provision for users who wished to delete content they had posted. Consumerist.com’s article (which links to the old and new TOS) quotes the deleted lines as:

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.

Naturally, as per their statement in their TOS that they can change anything in said TOS at will without notice, no one was informed of this change. This has quite a few people in an uproar.

Bottom line: if you’re an artist, author, photographer, etc, don’t post any of your works on Facebook. They will, in essence, become Facebook’s property. We don’t want that. Personally, I’m just glad I haven’t posted any of my writing on Facebook for fear of some publishers and agents still considering that to be voiding my first print rights. I hope that Facebook gets such a strong backlash from this change that they change it back, because this is way overstepping their bounds.

EDIT: For those of you who are interested, there is a group on Facebook protesting these changes.

EDIT, mark II: Amanda French has posted an entry on her blog comparing Facebook’s new TOS with that of other social networking sites.

Yet another EDIT: Here’s another article detailing Facebook’s content rights grab.