Everyone is up in arms about Facebook’s new TOS. I find this somewhat amusing actually because when I first joined Facebook and read their TOS, I had two thoughts: (1) wow, these terms are really broad — a perpetual, irrevocable, transferable license to anything I post??? and (2) H’mmm …. should I be using any of this language for any of my online clients? To me, it seems that all the revisions really do from a legal perspective is clarify that the license is perpetual and eliminate a potential hook for a Facebook customer to hang their hat on. The sentence Facebook deleted was arguably inconsistent with the perpetual and irrevocable license, and so they needed to get rid of it in order to eliminate that inconsistency. What the revisions really have done though, is shine a spotlight on what were already extremely broad terms. Probably not what Facebook was going for. What I also found interesting was the comment that Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly posted about the intent of the changes to the TOS and how Facebook “wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want”. As I was reading it, I was wondering: Would his comments be admissible in court by the customer whose content was just used by Facebook “in a way he did not want”? Perhaps this is the new hook for a Facebook customer to hang their hat on if they ever find themselves in the unfortunate situation of learning that Facebook has taken content from their profile to profit from it. The other hook may be the vague reference in the TOS to a user’s privacy settings. I personally have no idea what that means or how it limits Facebook’s license to customer content, but the fact that it is there must mean something. If nothing else, for that unhappy customer whose content has been snagged, he can try to claim that such use by Facebook violated his personal privacy settings. Whatever that means.
The hooks and crooks of Facebook’s notorious TOS revisions
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I didn’t join facebook at first because of what I read in their terms of service. But, after some reflection of a few weeks, I decided to join but to be careful to not post anything that I wanted to keep clearly copyright protected. However, my world-wide terms of service (posted on my website) clearly reflect that no-one can get any license to any of my copyrighted material (including publicity rights) without my express written consent and that all “one-click” agreements online are modified to included my terms (Called Standard Adamsky Terms and Conditions - SATAC). I wonder if Facebook read my terms?
Ed.