On February 4 Facebook revised their Terms of Service, removing a clause stating that user content would no longer be under license to Facebook.

UPDATE: Facebook did an about face and reverted to its previous ToS per a blog post on feb 17.

Well, now the terms indicate that anything you ever upload or share to your facebook profile — regardless of whether your account is active — is Facebook’s property to do whatever they want with. The language is similar but leaves less room for question. There are no longer references to “archived” content — but it’s debatable whether this is Facebook being more open about their intent or just being downright insulting and mischievous.

Did anyone receive notification to review the new Terms of Service before someone finally stumbled upon it — an outrageous 11 days after the fact? What if major publishers decide to boycott by removing “share on facebook” links? That’s not happening, not with the increasing traffic these blogs/sites receive via Facebook referrals.

This is the Internet, folks, and this is nothing new and hardly a surprise from Facebook — it was only a matter of time that they reworded the terms of content ownership (check out my previous posts on Facebook privacy here, here, and here).

If you’re someone who openly shares details and content on the Internet (as I do), you’re only fooling yourself if you believe said content cannot be “stolen” or used against you. Think you’re pre-February 4th content is protected (if you have since deleted your Facebook profile? Not likely. Facebook is the model for a walled garden online network. Now we’ll see how far they go with their power to abuse, sell, sublicense and manipulate user data and content.

The key passages of the ToS are below (new ToS / old ToS)

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

That language is the same as in the old TOS, (per Consumerist) but there was an important couple of lines at the end of that section that have been removed:

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.

Furthermore, the “Termination” section states:

The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service: Prohibited Conduct, User Content, Your Privacy Practices, Gift Credits, Ownership; Proprietary Rights, Licenses, Submissions, User Disputes; Complaints, Indemnity, General Disclaimers, Limitation on Liability, Termination and Changes to the Facebook Service, Arbitration, Governing Law; Venue and Jurisdiction and Other.

This kind of caught me by surprise — I’ve never seen anything — even in the Facebook App Developers’ small print — indicating that a user’s adding of an app equivocates signing away one’s likeness to said app for use in an add on your friends’ profiles. Here’s my friend Patrick Neeman of Speaktech being totally USED and I wonder if he even knows it?

Is this unique to the “Friends for Sale” App being advertised here or is this a standard policy allowed by developers who build Facebook Apps? Seems a little much to me… What do you think? Is this the kind of cross-promotion of your likeness you should expect when participating in an online community / social network?

There’s been a lot of talk about Facebook and its terms and dedication to privacy over the past 5 months since it launched the F8 Platform which spawned an elaborate and decentralized Developers Network.

We recently received a submission questioning Facebook’s Terms of Service:

Lowpoints: By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant… worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy… and distribute such User Content for any purpose…. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time.

Highpoints: 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.

Based on these terms, it should be clear to all that what happens in Facebook is Facebook’s. Sure, you can remove anything you submit / post on Facebook at any time, which consequentially terminates said liscences / sublicenses, but — does Facebook immediately archive all submissions? According to these terms, Facebook could stay out of trouble by immediately broadcasting all submissions/content via archival copies — which Facebook retains all rights to in perpetuity, whether or not the user withdraws said content. In essence, Facebook could hijack one’s copyright thanks by adding it’s stamp to an otherwise unchanged digital archive.

What deficiencies have you noticed in Facebook’s Terms and privacy policies in regards to third party applications? What issues do you fear / foresee and how can Facebook users further protect themselves? Moreover, what risk do these conflicts present to a company now “valued” at $15bn and how must it lead by example? Is Facebook breaking its own rules by allowing staff to circumvent the privacy policy, as Valleywag’s Nick Douglas alleged?

Richard submitted:

“If you phone up Microsoft in the UK, the first thing you hear is a tape recording saying that your call will be routed out of the country in order that your personal data may then be used and collected for any purpose in a country that does not abide by the UK Data Protection Act (1998), and if you don’t like it, hang up now.

What is the point of having data protection laws if I am required to waive my rights under them as a pre-requisite to speaking to a company?”

———

Wow. Not all that surprising, as the Gates’ and Jobs’ of the world can apparently do whatever they want, as they please, but this is the first I’ve heard such legislative sidestepping committed in such a straightforward manner.

Any other consumer experiences out there in which an automated voice notifies you before your rights are infringed upon?

(image via Ars Technica).

The days of being the next Subway Jared (with a lifetime of free food and years of paid commercials for being a reformed but still chubby dork) are long gone, I fear.

Just like CBS and their 15 seconds Super Bowl Commercial hijinks with YouTube, Southwest Airlines signed up with the Tube for the NBA Playoffs.

The Wanna Get Away contest invites anyone and everyone to submit a 30-second video of original content. The grand prize being that it will be shown. On TV. During a basketball game. “You have the chance to have millions of people laugh at you.” And…

Entrants grant permission to Sponsor to use their names, likenesses, biographical information for promotional or advertising purposes in all media worldwide, without notice or further compensation

It’s more like — Wanna Give Yourself Away? ….Be exploited your entire life, without a dime or free flight to show for it?

http://www.southwestwannagetaway.com/rules/

Hard to believe that User-Generated content necessitates such brutal terms… who would think that, by doing Yahoo! and Reuters a favor, and donating your photos/video, you’ve gotta literally sign your life and your friendships away — all, of course, without every pressing pen to paper.

YouWitness News has been written about all week — it went live yesterday.

Before you get all excited about being “the next Kevin Sites,” be sure to make your way to the Terms of Service — I’m sure nobody will — and remember the next Kevin Sites not only doesn’t get a million dollar salary but agree:

that You have the written consent, release, and/or permission of each and every identifiable individual person in Your Content to use such person’s name or likeness for use of Your Content by Yahoo! in the manner contemplated in these Additional Terms….

You retain your ownership rights, of course, but you only get credit in name — no links, e-mail addresses and/or comments — so nobody can follow-up to re-license or distribute. Either post it on YouTube, or:

…hereby grant Yahoo! the following worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sublicensable and transferable rights and licenses … to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, remix, excerpt, adapt, prepare derivative works and compilations of, publicly perform and publicly display Your Content on the Service or on any Yahoo! property, including in connection with any distribution or syndication arrangement thereof with third parties or third-party sites, in any media format or medium and through any media channels …

I just don’t think this is what most people have in mind when they think of crowdsourcing, citizen journalism and the like.

From the Business2.0 Softgadgets blog:

When your blog/community forum/project-management-site is sitting on Blogger or Typepad or MySpace or Friendster or Basecamp, it’s conceivable that some kind of terrible behavior will require them to take it down. The more public and free the forum, the better case these Web 2.0 titans have for maintaining the ability to do so: they have some minimal responsibility not to enable criminal behavior. But that line is incredibly unclear. Moreover, it’s not really a first amendment issue so much as its a prior agreement issue–when you check the acknowledgment box for the catch-all privacy policy upon signing up for this or that nifty Web 2.0 service, do you really think about your rights under this free and and difficult-to-read contract?

Of course you don’t. I’d love to hear if Blogger (nee Pyra and now a part of Google) has ever acted upon this clause of their ToS:

MODIFICATIONS TO SERVICE Pyra reserves the right to modify or discontinue the Service with or without notice to Member.

I’m partial to WordPress blogging software and note that there is no such statement in the terms on their blog-hosting service, wordpress.com.

Of course, while sites like Facebook and Myspace claim they will delete inappropriate content, I really wish MySpace would write in some rule that differentiates the typical sales pitch friend request from the legitimate, real person request…. but that’s another story…

]]> http://smallprint.netzoo.net/blogsocial-net-publishing-and-terms/feed/ 4 http://smallprint.netzoo.net/49/ http://smallprint.netzoo.net/49/#comments Thu, 30 Nov 2006 19:01:27 +0000 Andy Sternberg http://smallprint.netzoo.net/49/

More Scary / Weird User Agreements from Stephen, (via BoingBoing):

I was preparing to put together some past / present pictures of Lindsay Lohan for an entry on my blog about her recent letter to the family of Robert Altman.

I figured that wireimage would be a place for me to get nice clean images to use for the entry. I was going to pay for the use and
everything until I read their user agreement, which contains this passage:

CUSTOMER SHALL NOT AND AGREES THAT HE/SHE WILL NOT (i) SAVE, PRINT, COPY
OR REPRODUCE THE CONTENT AND/OR IMAGES RECEIVED THROUGH WWW.WIREIMAGE.COM

Does that mean that simply using a modern web browser – which saves images to my hard drive as part of the cache – instantly violates the user agreement?

Yikes!

—–

Stephen — there are still, of course safe havens for grabbing images as you probably already know. Google images can easily be grabbed, but images are crawled and indexed unless they are robot.txt- excluded from Google’s crawl, which means that many copyrighted and not intended for public use images end up there. best bet is using CreativeCommons search engine, or adding them to your Firefox search bar.

Also, support independent photographers or join the crowdsourcing revolution yourself at iStockPhoto, a marketplace of original royalty-free photos at low-cost. (Some fair deals at Getty Images as well.)

TechSoup recently posted this detailed FAQ about grabbing images from the Web.

lohan image from headexplodie’s flickr

]]> http://smallprint.netzoo.net/49/feed/ 1 http://smallprint.netzoo.net/return-of-the-ex-post-facto-eula/ http://smallprint.netzoo.net/return-of-the-ex-post-facto-eula/#comments Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:11:34 +0000 Andy Sternberg http://smallprint.netzoo.net/return-of-the-ex-post-facto-eula/

Augusto went looking for abusive EULA’s and submitted this one from Virtual Reach‘s “Conditions of License”:

“It is further agreed and understood that such conditions are not exhaustive and that Virtual Reach may from time to time **impose further conditions outside of this EULA**.”

Some other EULA’s we found that threaten to impose unstated conditions at any given time are: Verizon Wireless – constantly redefining the meaning of the world “unlimited.” Hmm, no others jumping out of my Db here… will have to keep hunting. Got an Ex-Post Facto threats for me?

]]> http://smallprint.netzoo.net/return-of-the-ex-post-facto-eula/feed/ 0 http://smallprint.netzoo.net/universal-goes-after-bofa-for-u2-one-parody/ http://smallprint.netzoo.net/universal-goes-after-bofa-for-u2-one-parody/#comments Mon, 20 Nov 2006 20:54:50 +0000 Andy Sternberg http://smallprint.netzoo.net/universal-goes-after-bofa-for-u2-one-parody/

It blew me away to scroll down and see a real life C&D order from a Universal Music Group attorney on Stereogum.com‘s embedded YouTube version of an obvious non-commercial parody of U2′s “One.”

How broke-ass will UMG and their copyright hounds get? Maria Aspan @ The New York Times tackles this hilarity:

————–

A video of two Bank of America employees singing a version of U2’s “One” to commemorate their company’s acquisition of MBNA recently made the rounds of the blogs, prompting amusement and some ridicule from online viewers.

But the intended comic effect of their performance and the retooled lyrics (“One spirit, we get to share it/Leading us all to higher standards”) seemed lost on lawyers on the lookout for copyright violations.

On Tuesday, a lawyer for the Universal Music Publishing Group, a catalog owner and administrator, posted the text of a cease-and-desist letter in the comments section of Stereogum.com, a Web site carrying the video. It contended that Bank of America had violated Universal’s copyright of the U2 song.

The two employees featured in the video were the guitarist, Jim Debois, a consumer market executive for Manhattan, and the singer, Ethan Chandler, a Manhattan banking center manager, who provoked much of the ridicule with his earnest interpretation and also for straying a bit far from U2’s lyrics with lines like “Integration has never had us feeling so good/and we’ll make lots of money.”

Mr. Chandler, who has independently released an album and is working on another, said he was asked to write and perform the song for an August meeting of credit card division executives at MBNA headquarters in Wilmington, Del.

He said he was surprised to learn about the cease-and-desist letter, stressing that his performance was meant for an internal audience. “There was an approved list of songs to use,” he said, “and as far I knew, that was an approved song.”

Universal said on Stereogum that it had sent the letter by fax and registered mail to Bank of America last Monday. On Friday, a bank spokeswoman, Betsy Weinberger, said the legal department had not yet received it.

The letter was signed by Raul R. Gonzalez, a lawyer for Universal Music. Reached at his office, Mr. Gonzalez said, “No comment” and hung up.

Online commentators accustomed to viral marketing said they suspected that the video was the latest corporate attempt to co-opt Internet video for promotional purposes. But Ms. Weinberger said it was “absolutely not” leaked by Bank of America as a marketing ploy.

Mr. Chandler also denied any involvement in leaking the video, although he admitted that, despite the cutting online criticism, the incident had an upside. “A lot of people thought it was fake, but I really do sing,” he said. “I’ve been doing this a long time.”

————

Here’s the Stereogum post that features both the lyrics(!) and the C&D from Gonzalez in comments, complete with typos: “As a courtesy to you and, in order to put Sterorgum.com on notice, I am attaching the text of a cease and desist letter sent to Bank of America’s legal counsel….”

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