No! Don’t be silly! They simply assign themselves the right to…
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, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, 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 sublicenses of the foregoing.
Allowing Facebook an irrevocable*, worldwide license to everything you post… why, it’s the least you can do after everything Facebook has done for you, isn’t it?
*Okay, it’s not really irrevocable: The TOS also says, “If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire.” Big of them.
3 Comments
This is awesome! How much do they pay for my stuff!? I usually charge $150/hr or about $1.50/word…soooooo….?
I actually think that this licence is completely reasonable. You own the copyright on what you posted; they just want to make sure that no-one could sue Facebook, saying “You allowed my copyrighted content to appear on Fred’s computer!” or “When a thumbnail view of my page appeared as part of Joe’s friends page, that’s a derivative work, and I didn’t grant you a derivative work licence: I’m suing!”
How would you word a licence that makes it absolutely clear that Facebook has the right to do all of the things that it does with your Facebook page content in the ordinary course of running Facebook?
I dunno, Andy — “for any purpose” makes it sound like they’re securing the rights to use user-generated content for a wide variety of non-Facebook purposes. Ditto on the right to sublicense. Ditto for that “in connection with the site” phrasing, which is ambiguous enough to mean practically anything. I think all that could be trimmed neatly away without endangering Facebook’s core business.