Not your Facebook
Written on January 15, 2008
From my comments section….
Scott Brauer posted this most interesting comment on the Facebook revolution…and it is scary.
Frankly it reads like many an editorial contract nowadays…but the fact that it is Facebook, with god knows how many users and growing by the hundreds of thousands every day, makes it scarier.
“Those social networking sites can be useful, but photographers need to be careful with the terms and conditions. Facebook, for instance, has a ballsy rights grab in their terms: “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, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, 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.”
A little more about it in the Nation at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080107/melber
Filed in: Uncategorized, Word on the Street.
Absolutely true. I went to College with Scott. This is the exact reason why I don’t post ANY of my work on myspace, aside from one avatar featuring an iconic image from my fashion work.
I actually have that posted on my facebook wall. I don’t have any images up there, but I’m always surprised by how many people do.
Thanks for posting this more prominently; I think it’s a big issue. Many other photo-hosting sites have similar terms and conditions. Google’s Picasa, for instance, is pretty bad. Flickr isn’t so bad on this front, though the prominent encouragement they give to creative commons licensing, is pretty suspect.
Whenever I talk about this subject with people, they always say something like “well, sure, but what are they going to do with all those photos?” Here’s a post on the Wired blog that gives an answer: http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/01/facebook-ads-ma.html
There’s a thorny issue here, though, in that the photos probably don’t have model releases. And there’s an editorial issue developing in Canada regarding facebook supplying photos of a dead teenager to news media with a credit to facebook: http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/tech/internet/facebook-legal.html
fuck that, I’m getting off facebook, I don’t even know what the hell I am doing there anyway. thanks for pointing that out.