Monday, January 14, 2008

Well this SUCKS! You Gotta FaceBook Page?

Just after posting the insane rantings of the Ford legal team, I find this interesting nugget. How many of you photographers have FaceBook pages? Did you read the TOS? Did you know you just gave your pictures away. Yep... You did. And you can take them down, but you already gave them to FaceBook.

How you feelin' now? Huh?

Can you imagine the frikkin' balls of these people? (sorry for my language, but I am absolutely astounded, amazed and pissed off.
Thoughts of a Bohemian: "“By posting user content to any part of the site, you automatically grant … an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide licence … to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such user content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise. … Facebook does not assert any ownership over your user content.”

CBC.CA, the Canadian news website, has a great story about Facebook. I a nutshell, it explains, with a recent example, that any image that you upload to you Facebook account can be used without your authorization, for free, anywhere . And unlike the tricky option of Creative Commons, Facebook does NOT grant you a choice. It is all or nothing."

3 comments:

Will Foster said...

Very interesting, i was reading about this the other day. Fortunately, the files uploaded to Facebook are such low quality that there wouldn't be much that they could do with them anyway.

It would be a poor business move for Facebook to take advantage of this in a way of advertising themselves. So far, I dont think they have.

My guess is similar to why Flickr would have the same thing (or similar). So if they put the picture on their own blog, the user can't sue them. Even though the photo on the blog links to the users profile.

It is really just placed there to keep from people suing them, and making a few bucks. People are always looking for ways to steal money from large companies and feeding their empty pockets.

Don said...

Hi Will,
The part that bothered me was the third party sales. I think that Facebook resizes images, so I think someone could upload something larger, but you may be right about that. However, in this increasingly web oriented world, a small image could be used somewhere. Flickr covers their butt for the reason you said, but Yahoo does not claim the ability to resell the images. And... if you take them down, they are gone. Facebook keeps all images uploaded.

I looked into it quite a bit before posting and it still seemed kinda hincky to me. They claim all use rights in perpetuity... even after you have left the site.

Thanks for visiting.

Will Foster said...

Ah yeah, very interesting... I personally upload images to Facebook at 600px wide, so that way when i throw my logo and web address to it, i know it will be visible. But yeah, it is totally a photographer's worst nightmare!

I love Flickr, so, that is good news! :) I just had heard of it when reading a blog somewhere, I never did any research on it.