Licensing Content · Tuesday September 11, 2007
I feel extremely uncomfortable with the following:
“When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. 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.”
– From Facebook’s Terms of Use.
Woah, Facebook retains the right to SUBLICENSE anything you upload to their site. That’s effed! Most online ‘social networking sites’ have similar policies in place (Virb, MySpace, Flickr, Last.FM’s seems a bit better/simpler). While you retain ownership over your content/work, it seems like you basically give the company a free license to use and reformat any of your content for their own purposes. Yuck.
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