Posts Tagged ‘warning’

I’m really quite exhausted, so I don’t have the energy to write the full post that I wanted to this morning. For an update on the Facebook TOS situation, Colleen Lindsay posted a good rundown of it on her blog. Head on over there for your information, and hopefully I’ll have more energy to write tomorrow.

@Colleen_Lindsay tweeted 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.

Once again, I’ve engaged in some crazy link hopping. I don’t even remember where I started out, but I ended up on Mur Lafferty’s blog, I Should Be Writing. I happened to click on the link for her video podcast, “Excuses and Feedback,” and a little while in she talks about a part of the GoogleDocs TOS agreement that was brought to her attention that might cause problems for writers using the service to share manuscripts with others.

The following appears in section 11 (Content licence [sic] from you) in GoogleDoc’s TOS (emphasis added):

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds a little fishy to me. Needless to say, I’ve deleted all documents from my GoogleDocs and will not be using this service any more.