Facebook ta’r din ophavsret

Media is ripe with stories about people who have found out, that photos they have put on the net has been sold, used in commercials or in other ways been misused behind their back. The culprits are not only sleazy types, but even companies such as Microsoft and Fox TV (Well, somebody might put them in the sleazy category too, but that’s another discussion).

The bad news is that the net has not just made it very easy to show of your own photos – it has made it just as easy for others to nick them. The good news is that copyright also exists in cyberspace. If you find out, that somebody has made illegal use of you photo or text, you can take legal action. That is if you haven’t given away your copyright already, of course…

And that is precisely what you have done, if you have set up a profile on Facebook. Because in the process of doing so, you accept a set of “Terms of use“, which includes the following:

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.

You don’t have to be a lawyer to realize, that what this means is that you practically give Facebook the right to do whatever they want with your material, including selling it for profit to whomever they want.

Some Facebook users have defended the company, claiming that these terms are a practical and economical necessity. That’s bullocks. On Flickr, one of the largest photo-sharing sites of the Internet, users have full freedom to either claim complete copyright or allow their photos to be used by others under a Creative Commons license. That doesn’t prevent illegal use in itself. But it makes it possible for people, whose work has been misused, to take action.

If this works for Flickr, it could of course work for Facebook too. Hopefully, Facebook will someday realize that the concept of user-generated content doesn’t go well with the concept of disrespect for the users. Until that day, the best you can do as a Facebook user is probably just never to upload anything, which you wouldn’t be willing to throw away for free…