Intellectual Property rights and Facebook: is there a lawyer in the house?

[sydneygb]

Apparently Facebook made an update to their Terms of Service a few weeks ago that nobody noticed until today:You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan,

Comments

[amykay73]

{sigh} I too would like to believe the explanation, but you're right that something doesn't seem right. I just use Facebook to catch up with old friends, so I'm not too worried, but I would be a lot more concerned if any or my fic or personal creations were attached to the site.

I hope you get some answers!

[kragar00]

Facebook can't assume the rights from another site if you link to it... I.e. if you post a link to your AC stuff, they don't gain the rights to the AC stuff... AC has those....
That said, from the look of it, they could take all of your posts, put them in a book, and publish the unauthorized biography of Sydney the way it's written...
So, just keep that in mind...

[sydneygb]

Yeah, that's not good. Not that I post much to Facebook, really. Mostly random status updates, which sometimes got sent from Twitter, but I may can that app (again) in light of this TOS upgrade.

Bad Facebook. BAD!

[kragar00]

Probably no new news for you, but:
http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-general/20090217/Facebook.Sharing/

[arcadian72]

Facebook posted THIS this morning -
"Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.

If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

"