Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

Facebook's recent change in their Terms of Service is causing quite an uproar.  To professional photographers and others who post original works, it has serious implications.

For many of you this is probably a moot point. Who cares if Facebook owns the drunk photos of you in college? But what if they then licensed the pics to classmates.com or an online dating service and your mug suddenly showed up in banner ads everywhere?

A quick summary of the change: You own your stuff as long as your account is active. However, once the account is closed the line that protected your old content has been removed from the Terms of Service, so technically Facebook now owns it. 

Will they do anything with all this old content? That remains to be seen, but the possibility that they can worries many:

http://www.adotas.com/2009/02/facebook-now-owns-old-content/

http://consumerist.com/5150175/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can-do-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever

and commentary here:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/16/zuckerberg-on-who-owns-user-data-on-facebook-its-complicated/