Facebook Copyright - have you read the small print?

We set up Broadstuff on Facebook a few weeks back, to experiment with how one type of social media interacts with another. We also set up a group in Twitter.

Its been an interesting experience, but one of the issues that emerges as one publishes more material on the site, is that question of "just whose stuff is this" becomes more pressing. With respect to copyright, Facebook's FAQ says:

You retain the copyright to your content. When you
upload your content you grant us a license to use and display
your content. For more information please visit our Terms of
Use, which contain a link to our Copyright Policy and other
important information about your privileges and responsibilities
as a Facebook user.

All very nice...but, when you dig into the Terms and Conditions, they say:

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and
direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in
order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content
on the Site. 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 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.

Words like irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, sublicence rights and "any purpose" are quite worrying.

Don't get us wrong, we went into this with eyes open, the point we're making is that a month down the line, when you add up the content our blog alone has given Facebook, thats quite a lot of material. Does it matter - not yet, but at some point it probably will - imagine for example that we become Global Gurus, and our mojo is sought from the millions....Facebook has automatic rights to rush to market worldwide with our own work as vodcasts, podcasts, books, whatever.

Or, cometh the Facebook monetisation, the ability to grab and manipulate a lot of media and data for free (eg photos etc) would be potentially fairly valuable.

(Note today....Google is fighting attempts to make it remove its data after a time period)

An alternative is our approach to Twitter, where we basically post the heading and the url of the post, so the content is not published on Twitter per se - less satisfying perhaps as its a 2 click read, but its certainly far clearer who has the rights, albeit creative commons ones.