Do you have pictures on Facebook? It looks like the FB lawyers are using that nice little trick of hiding the cunning goodies in the legal confusion and hoping people won’t notice.

Now we enjoy Facebook as well as the next guy, but this is a bit nuts. Thanks to Everett shooting it our way.

The Facebook terms of use state that any image you post is essentially theirs for the taking. As long as it remains on their site they say they can do pretty much whatever they want with it. Here’s the quote from their terms of use.

On the suggestions side. I myself always post low res images. Not only on FB, but on Flickr, my site etc. I usually logo them, and keep em in the 600-800px range. It’s true that at that size somebody could still steal them for their site, but what they’d get would not really be print quality. That however is no excuse for FB.

“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. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content”

Looks like it’s time for the FB lawyers to call back to earth, and for a lot of users to voice their complaints. Especially those of us that are photographers. I seem to recall Adobe doing something like this recently (wink). They backed down after a bit of outrage. For the record let me say that YOU Facebook have NO RIGHTS to use my photos. I’ve just revoked them.

Gavin Seim