Illustrators and Facebook

[ben_templesmith]

Good article about being wary of uploading your art to that place from Anna Goodson...

Facebook - Illustrators “ be -a -ware”

“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 on the Site. By posting User Content to

Comments

[lx]

The only kind of abuse I would ever be concerned about would be from users who are not bound by any kind of ToS. Honestly, I get my stuff ripped off by MySpace and Facebook users constantly (hotlinking my illustrations as backgrounds, fantasy avatars, etc). Whatever, it just helps my Google Pagerank and gets me more exposure. MySpace.com, distribute my stuff. Please.

Ultimately it's exceedingly unlikely that either Facebook or MySpace would attempt to Do Whatever It Is That People Are Afraid They'd Do with their stuff. Both sites point out that removing the content from the site immediately cancels the agreement, so if they were planning on extending their business model to pirating Everyone's Crappy Photography and Bedroom-Recording Bands, that is beyond impractical. "Hey Hank, hold up that MySpace Super Ripoff Sampler CD, Wildslutangel22 just deleted her damn band."

It's just legalese for "you give us the right to crop and resize your images and put them on app/profile/search pages as necessary, without guarantee of what they are adjacent to or near, which is hard to predict specifically since the Social Networking Thing changes every other week, and you have no way to sue us if you don't like how they wind up looking/what page/application they end up showing up on and how that might represent you."

[ben_templesmith]

Oh sure, there's the good side to it. But people should always be aware of the potential.Hence that article, which I think takes a rather even keeled response to the whole thing.

[lx]

Absolutely, the article is fair. And it's never a bad idea to err on the side of assuming that the Media Behemoth Speaking Legal Lingo is Probably Evil, since they Probably Are. It's just also important to remember that they're quite Self-Interested, and screwing their cash cow (the users with their insistently chattering teeth) ain't a great way to maintain their Ridiculous, Scrooge McDuck-Style Money Bins full of corporate ad revenue.

On the other-other hand, large corporations have also been known to make very dumb decisions, and it's also probably worth noting that god-only-knows if these guys can modify their ToS retroactively at any time should the business model change for the worse, or they find themselves with an undiscovered artist with tremendous revenue potential.

Somewhere between Paranoia and Pragmatism lies Prudence.