I'm now committed to lobbying Facebook for better notifications of policy changes. If you'd like to help support this cause please join the group: "Facebook Fair Notification Supporters." The direct link is: [www.facebook.com]

Anything they do is really believable as they seem to look at everyone as just another number, not as anyone who matters.

Now, if they would police the members who are illegitimate as well as they do legitimate ones, I would believe they were really serious about running a clean operation, but they do not, and they do not even ask for details.

An arrogant company, as witnessed by recent events.

Their intent was quite clearly spelled out in the new TOS, and, even though they were forced to relent today, you can be sure that Facebook's lawyers are working even now on some other means of achieving their desired goal.
They're just lying low until the heat's off.

The particularly galling part of the change in ToS is that they didn't give people the choice to opt out before implementing it! If they'd said 'These are our new terms of service, which will take effect on 1 March. If you do not agree with the new terms of service, you have until that date to discontinue the use of your account and delete any content you do not want retained by Facebook,' that would have been one thing. At least then it wouldn't have been an exercise in 'Hey, let's see how stupid and inattentive our users are!'

to quote facebooks TOS under "User Content posted on the Site" http://www.facebook.com/terms.php?ref=pf

"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, 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. "

English translation, If you post anything to facebook, we can do anything we want with it, including sell it for $$$$ and we don't have to give you a dime.

@Dean Siracusa: You realize that most online media have some sort of perpetual license agreement, right? Just by commenting in Consumerist, you're granting the Consumerist to republish/broadcast, etc as many times as they want. It's pretty much a standard.

I do not grant them the license to, for example, use it on a billboard or a commercial. If they want to do that, they better be prepared to give me a cut.

This is what I have a problem with: "...fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense)..." and "....and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise..."

Sublicense means to be able to rent your work, photos, video, music, etc... to others. You are still relinquishing your rights to your work according to the Facebook TOS.

Heeeeeere ya go, it's the permant delete page...now with a message saying they made a mistake with the TOS.

[www.facebook.com]

The Bill of Rights group wasn't working when I was on it a few minutes ago.

As for perpetual rights, it's apparently common for online media. The Toronto Star and the New York Times both indicate that they have perpetual rights to use user-generated comment in any way, shape or form. Just a thought.

Why was this comment disemvoweled? I get the gist of the content, but what that the only reason, or was it the tone?

Yes, I realize that any TOS is going to claim license of some posted materials, but Facebook's altered TOS was ridiculously overreaching, executed behind the users' backs and written in impenetrable legalese, all of which are antagonistic practices to intelligent consumers.

I'm not "condoning" it, but it's very easy to see how they landed in that situation. To give a bit of an analog, I do a little legal consulting for churches & other religious organizations (and for litigation firms working on lawsuits where a church is a party). One constant and ongoing problem is that the lawyers are trying to protect their church-client as strongly as possible, while the church is trying to create a structure that expresses its religious mission and beliefs (which might involve, say, shared governance instead of a corporate structure of authority). The lawyers tend to be familiar with particular modes of doing things, and are reluctant to step outside those modes because it introduces uncertainty, which means potential liability. The churches are often not sophisticated enough to know if there's an alternative mode of doing things to what the lawyers suggest. So you end up with lawyers trying to do their jobs and protect their clients who not only create absurd structures that seem very antagonistic for their purpose, but where the lawyer/client relationship itself gets antagonistic!

There's some movement in law schools towards understanding underlying motivations, particularly as part of negotiation and mediation, which is sort-of a baby version of worrying about PR and perception, but lawyers just really aren't oriented or trained that way, and I can hypothesize situations where being concerned about PR might actually conflict with your duty to your client and become ethically sticky.

Three cheers to Consumerist and its awesome staff. Great job, guys. Also, what do you think the Gawker "leadership" team's reaction was to the fury that Consumerist unleashed on the intarweb? My guess?

/facepalm

It took this individual 5 days to hear back from FB and clear up this mess - after which several friends were out 1,000s of dollars.

We aware!! Control your information.

That's why no matter what they say, I still won't get on Facebook. Especially now.

I echo other posters in thanking Consumerist for the post on this, and everyone who commented for making it clearer to me. Without you guys, I might have gone on it anyway and lost something important.

Very clever response on two counts.

First is the concession on principle. It's a classic opening gambit in hardball negotiations. Doing so gets the noise level down, and hands the battle off to the lawyers, activists and fine print. And, as we all know, you can get pretty much anything you want by carefully crafting the fine print.

Second is the broad invitation to help draft the Facebook Bill or Rights. This engages the existing community, and only brings more attention to the site. And it might even result in the discovery of a virtual James Madison.

Evil, but Brilliant. John Malone would be proud.

Yes, i do agree changing the TOS with out telling people was a bit shady...or wait, not it wasn't, considering one of the first lines of the original, and all subsequent TOS included the line "TERMS MAY CHANGE WITH OR WITHOUT NOTICE"

If you don't want people seeing something, don't post it online, this is as bad as girls who post nudies to photobucket and then get mad when they turn up on another site.

I know im preaching to the choir, but i just wanted to give my 2 cents.

(joking, no banhammer, plz)

@Lucky225:

You'll be safe as long as you wear your tin-foil hat. It also helps to frequently rub yourself all over with a magnet, which will scramble the control chips they've secretly implanted.

Right now, I'm glad that they've changed their TOS/TOU. I had thought of leaving FB, but realized that it would be impossible to do so - I rely on it so much to promote my online magazine...it's a business tool for me. I'm going to keep an eye on their changes though. If it gets too far, I may have to rethink.

I don't trust Zuck & Co. They have shown that they are trying to be sneaky by not pointing out the changes like they did the reversion. They could just as easily post the updates, highlighting the changes, to our profiles and requiring us to accept the terms in order to continue using the service.

If the user is not made aware of the changes, he/she assumes they are the same as before. You cannot assume their agreement on unannounced changes. What reasonable man is going to read the ToU every day to see if there are any changes. That is essentially what they expect users to do if they are not willing to post a notice and require user acceptance to continue service.

I expect this to be a lead case in ToS/ToU for the future of web services. There will be major legal action in the short-term that will force web services to do a better job of notifying and explaining changes to users.

Thank you LandruBek for that statement. I'm glad to see that I'm not the only cynic when it comes to reading and interpreting contracts.

Hey now! Oh, wait, no, that's exactly the problem. :)

I could see exactly why they (or their lawyers, rather) went where they did with the TOS, which would have provided Facebook protection from some potentially very serious lawsuits. But I could also see at the same time why I would never, as a consumer, agree to that TOS.

As with the discussion about contracts of adhesion last week, I'm left wondering when we're going to get around to creating a new body of law that addresses contracts of adhesion, TOSes, and things like that. Because their lawyers aren't wrong to overreach to protect their clients ... but the users have no lawyers to overreach to protect them, and they don't get to settle on mutually-agreeable terms. Take it or leave it.

Link didn't transfer over:

[www.digitaljournal.com]

I've noticed in a lot of the comments people are downplaying the importance and/or power of the TOS like it doesn't matter well here is an example of facebook taking ownership of someone else's content, this was a comment I found on the original Facebook TOS post:

---

Willjan

Check out:

[www.digitaljournal.com]

A Canadian model poster her image on Facebook. On an assignment, she was murdered in China. Now Facebook is "licensing" her image for use in news reports.

---

If you look you will see they have All Rights Reserved and Attribution (The act of attributing, especially the act of establishing a particular person as the creator of a work of art): Facebook.com

Do you think they sent a representative to take a picture of this lady? No, of course not, they took it from her Facebook profile and now claim all rights to it.

(5) notify us of TOS changes upon login

(1) give me complete control over deleting (and i mean completely deleting, not just delinking) any photos/videos/my entire account
(2) recognize that i have the right to join and leave groups, friend and defriend people as i please. if you chose to keep this data for any internal purposes, keep it anonymous. you should not sell/give away data on what groups i joined and left, who i friended and defriended.
(3) realize that people may have private conversations on your site, especially with the facebook chat applet. at no time should any of my wall messages/private messages/facebok chat messages/status messages be sold or provided to a 3rd party without the express permission of both parties involved (if i write a message on Mark Z's wall, both him and i need to authorize before it's given to a 3rd party)
(4) there are lots of artists on the internet. you should not stifle their artistic potential by claiming rights to use their work when they post it on your website. What happens when i "share" a link to a webcomic that i didn't write? are you going to claim rights to that? also, i know that lots of people use copyrighted images as their "face pic" even though you require us to check a box that we own the copyrights... how are you going to claim rights to something that was illegally uploaded to your server?

I'm happy to know they reverted to their old terms of service. This reminds me of that Beacon bull that they pulled a while back.

The problem is not limited to Facebook, of course: it's why I won't do photoprinting with (for example) Snapfish. They say, "As a condition to your Membership, you hereby grant Snapfish a perpetual, universal, non-exclusive, royalty-free right to copy, display, modify, transmit, make derivative works of, and distribute your Content, solely for providing or improving the Service" and "Snapfish may amend these Terms at any time, for any reason, and without notice, including the right to terminate the Service or any part of the Service." No thanks!

So I use a different photo printer that doesn't have such nonsense in their terms of service.

And that's why I call it Facist Book

Ha nice, my comment is in the article:

"Facebook should now be called The Information Blackhole," one Consumerist commenter proclaimed. "What goes in never comes out. Be careful what you huck in there."

Too bad CNN is just doing damage control and their basic logic is 'most people don't give a crap so it doesn't matter'. Disappointing but not at all surprising from a major media outlet.

They don't own your content, they merely pwn it.

"yppy k"
and
"yy!"
?

More like:

Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of unfavourable media attention about the changes and what they mean for people and their information.

I'm sure they don't give a crap about what users actually want when it comes to rights in the digital world.

I feel relieved and better knowing that its gone. I know Facebook can be a useful service but anyone else could do it without all the legal hyperbole. They say its for this and that and pull at your heart strings to gain sympathy but it also means a lot of scary things as well.

Often bad things are covered up in 'good intentions' to make them palatable for the public. I find their activity disturbing in a precedent setting way and I don't want to support that type of behavior as being acceptable. Those who don't respect their rights will have them taken away from them, especially with the tool of 'good intentions'

Fscebook Blog about reverting back

But what would I know? I guess I don't have reading comprehension skills. :)

First, I want to apologize for the delay in response. It’s been a long day with lots of interesting and constructive discussions. Second, I want to thank you for your questions and concerns. As Mark expressed in his blog post on Monday, it was never our intention to confuse people or make them uneasy about sharing on Facebook. I also want to be very clear that Facebook does not, nor have we ever, claimed ownership over people’s content. Your content belongs to you.

We do need certain licenses in order to facilitate the sharing of your content through our service. That’s where the Terms of Use come in. The fact that you’ve raised the questions you have is proof that we haven’t done a good job explaining these licenses in the actual language of the document. In fact, as we were working to answer your questions, we realized the new version of the Terms might technically permit some of the hypothetical situations people have offered. I can assure you, however, that these hypotheticals aren’t ones we had in mind when writing the Terms, and that selling user information for profit or using it to advertise Facebook in some way was never part of our original intent. Assurances aren’t enough, though, and we plan to codify this in our revised Terms through simple language that defines Facebook’s rights much more specifically.

In the meantime, we’ve decided to revert to the old Terms as we work to address this. Mark has explained this in more detail in another blog post (http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54746167130), and we’ve created a group where people can provide input (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=69048030774). We hope you’ll join this group and post comments. We promise to use these comments to help construct a new Terms of Use that reflects the principles around how people share and control their information, and that’s written clearly in language everyone can understand.

I hope you don’t think your participation in this discussion was a waste of time. Honestly, your questions were very helpful to us in arriving at what we believe is the right decision. Also, I think your questions will continue to be useful as we’re crafting a new Terms.

Again, thanks for the fruitful discussion and a special thanks to Anne Katherine and Julius for setting up this feedback forum. We hope you’ll all join our “Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” group and continue discussing these issues there.

Best,
Barry

Barry Schnitt
Facebook Communications
barry@facebook.com

Fcbk, fcbk, fcbk, fcbk!

Cnsmrst jst gt PWND by CNN: [www.cnn.cm]

"Fcbk's trms f srvc clm tht th cmpny ds nt hv wnrshp vr cntnt"

Rdng cmprhnsn sklls ftw.

Rdng cmprhnsn fr th gd dmn WN.