intellectual properties

TOU

i recently acquired a facebook profile, despite the should-be-heeded warnings such as this, because, well, you know…all the cool kids are doing it. i’m finding all the little widgets on facebook to be sort of creepy, like how you can see every single thing that everyone else has changed about their profile, or who they’ve just befriended, or what they’ve written on someone else’s “wall”. i know each user can change their settings which determine how much of your activity everyone else can see, but it still completely promotes some serious lurking.

i mentioned in the post about mydeathspace that it does sort of weird me out to think that some individual, group, company or org could take whatever i post there about myself and use it as content for something else. i have wondered now and then if some of the photos or content i’ve posted here or on my profiles have ended up in other places – copyscape.com keeps me aprised about content, more or less, but like ariel recently discovered – you never know where your old photos might end up. they might even end up in an ad for whatever site you posted it on.

the facebook terms of service state that they can use your content for promotional purposes anywhere, at any time, including translating your content and incorporating it into “other works”:

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.

myspace and others have similar terms for using/reproducing your content, but facebook’s are far less limited. with tribe.net, for example, their terms state a limited license for reproduction for “mechanical” purposes only and specifically state that you are NOT granting license for any other use. they are, however, able to change these terms at any point in time. what this means is that i’m definitely going to go and delete blog posts i’ve reposted to sites like myspace, because i do NOT want my content translated/republished for any reason, especially not for some ad campaign. photos? whatever. content – no way.

tonight, i’m going to a focus group on social networking sites. i’m very interested to see how much the average web user knows about these things, and how they view their participation in them. i think most people don’t care/don’t think anything bad or weird will ever happen to them/their content, and that’s probably true. it just seems that more and more we’re all willing to sign away certain rights in exchange for services these days, and you wonder where it stops.

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