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Comments

Martin Doonan

Although you still own the IP:
"Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content."
I think I'd need a lawyer just to sort that lot out.
The other worrying thing is the sweeping definition of "User Content": pretty much anything you post up that others can see, they can use in any way they like.

Doug Plummer

That you still "own" the copyright is meaningless when they've already granted themselves all rights to your work, even the right to sublicense. Overall it's an offensive set of terms.

romanlily

Stuff like this is further encouragement for me to just give up on Facebook altogether. (Or at least quietly remove all my photos from the site. Which I just did.)

Jim Roelofs

Doug, spot on. These sites are to be avoided, like the black plague.

bowerbird

romanlily said:
> Or at least quietly remove all my photos
> from the site. Which I just did.

doesn't matter. once you uploaded them,
you gave over full rights. _in_perpetuity._
you can be sure facebook backs up its files,
so the fact that you've now "removed" them
makes absolutely no difference in the world.

for what it's worth, myspace has the same terms.

i don't see why any creative individual would
submit _anything_ to these sites, to be honest.

-bowerbird

Justin Weiss

What if you post photos in SmugMug and then use a Facebook app like SmugFoto to enable them to be viewed on Facebook? Technically, you're not posting the photos on Facebook because they are on the SmugMug server.

Also, these kinds of one-sided corporate contracts that no one ever reads (known as "contracts of adhesion") often fail to hold up in court. But you'd have to hire a lawyer and sue to challenge the Facebook contract, which would be a time-consuming and expensive ordeal.

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