Facebook Gives Itself Permanent, Irrevocable License to Use Your Stuff and Your Image

Don't post pictures or other creative content to Facebook if you want to retain your rights to use it commercially:

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, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

What all that means is if you ever post anything to Facebook, no matter how briefly, and even if you delete your account, they own rights to it. The right is non-exclusive, which means that they very generously allow you to use it, too.

(Via.)

Update: It's worse than I initially thought. Check out the definition of User Content:

"User Content" means any photos, text, link, audio, video, designs, ads and anything else that you Post on or through the Facebook Service. "Post" means to upload, post, transmit, share, store, link to or otherwise make available on or through the Facebook Service.

(Emphasis added.)

I think this makes clear that Facebook intends to take a license in all content of yours that you link to. So, if you link to a post on your blog, they claim they have a license to reprint your blog in its entirety.

A user group, People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS), has been created.

Update 2/18/09: Victory of sorts.

Comments

[phillygrrl]

Amazing. Amazing and awful. I had no idea. Pure evil I say.

[Glomarization]

Well, they can claim all they want with the new TOS, but I don't see how it would stick. The phone company can't claim a license on a song you write and then sing to a friend over long distance; UPS can't claim a license to a book manuscript that you've written and then overnighted to your editor.

But what do I know? I'm only a law student.

[upyernoz]

maybe we should put up links in FB to organizations we don't like. FB owns you now, suckers!