TheFacebook - What it can do with your Photos and other content! (via little acorn photography)
But after some diligent research and a whole lotta' back & forth on the merits and demerits, we've decided to start pulling all of our photos from Facebook.
Everyone has heard by this point all the hullaballoo about Facebook's privacy issues. What you may have missed is the issue of ownership. We've discovered bits of language in the Facebook Terms of Service that, frankly, disturb us.
When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content of the Site. 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 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 sublicense of the foregoing.
What this basically means is that although Facebook allows us to retain ownership over our uploaded work, we also understand that Facebook declares it has the right to do whatever, whenever with our photographs. If Facebook wanted to sell our images, of our clients, to someone else, they absolutely can and we'll never know. But this isn't an issue of money or recompense; ownership over our work is something we take very seriously here at Little Acorn Photography, in both personal and professional stances. And its also an issue of protecting you, the client.
We can't, in good conscience, allow for a third-party entity to stake a claim to our work and potentially use images of our clients without our or their knowledge, so at this point, the best we can do to rectify this is by removing our photos from the L.A.P. page. This is a small part of why we started this blog, so we would have a different, and easy, way to share the latest images with everyone in one convenient area.
I ran across this at the Little Acorn Photography website while doing some research on Posterous (slowly becoming my new interweb home).
Wow! is all that comes to mind. You still own your photos and other content, but if you read that inner blockquote carefully, you are authorizing the sublicense of ALL your user content to be used to promote or make derivative works from or incorporate into other work.
So, basically, if I'm interpreting this correctly, thefacebook could publish a book called "People of Facebook" and post any photos that have been uploaded. Or "Babies of Facebook 2010" and all the folks posting photos of their kidz would be granting a license to use those photos in a book, movie, video, what-have-you.
Now, would thefacebook actually DO that, in light of all the recent flack over privacy? I don't think they would, but they have the right to.
With the age of digital/mobile photos and insta-posting, who knows what the true ownership is anymore.
