bradgrier.com

Does a Creative Commons license trump Facebook’s TOS agreement?

An inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion is hap­pen­ing in the blo­go­sphere right now con­cern­ing the one-way dir­ec­tion of con­tent into Face­book. Dan York and Chris Brogan both raise val­id con­cerns about the need to be a Face­book mem­ber in order to view redir­ec­ted or repack­aged con­tent through the portal (Face­book). Ah, but wait, if you aren’t a Face­book…

An inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion is hap­pen­ing in the blo­go­sphere right now con­cern­ing the one-way dir­ec­tion of con­tent into Face­book. Dan York and Chris Brogan both raise val­id con­cerns about the need to be a Face­book mem­ber in order to view redir­ec­ted or repack­aged con­tent through the portal (Face­book).

Ah, but wait, if you aren’t a Face­book user, you could­n’t see it, could you? No, you have to login first in order to see any of that con­tent. Only once inside the Face­book walls can you see it all.

And the oth­er stun­ning pro­nounce­ment that Face­book appears to become a ‘licensor’ of your content.

Now con­sider this… through the vari­ous applic­a­tions, I’m bring­ing into Face­book my entries from this blog, my Twit­ter posts (tweets), my del.icio.us book­marks. Poten­tially videos and pictures.

It would cer­tainly appear from the ToS that I’m giv­ing Face­book a license to do whatever it wants with all of that con­tent. Forever.

But wait.

What about Cre­at­ive Com­mons license? My blog con­tent is so licensed, as is Dan’s and Chris’. Twit­ter and del.icio.us all have their own TOS agree­ment. Does this mean that once we (the con­tent cre­at­or) dir­ect our con­tent to Face­book via RSS feed (or some oth­er mech­an­ism), we lose con­trol of that con­tent, even though said con­tent is CC license protected?

Or is there some oth­er line in the TOS that I’ve not seen yet that states some­thing to the effect that by send­ing our con­tent to Face­book, we neg­ate all pre­vi­ous or cur­rently val­id rights.

Obvi­ously I’m not of the leg­al pro­fes­sion, but I won­der if any­one has any more inform­a­tion on this, methinks this bears more check­ing into.

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4 responses to “Does a Creative Commons license trump Facebook’s TOS agreement?”

  1. Who Are You, Digitally Speaking? at A Media Circus

    […] a plat­form needs to be able to be mon­et­ized and so does con­tent (Brad Gri­er pon­ders this over at his blog) but that needs to be a sec­ond­ary or even a ter­tiary thought, as a plat­form without mass will never […]

    Reply
  2. Chris Brogan... Avatar
    Chris Brogan...

    I had­n’t even star­ted to think about the cre­at­ive com­mons angle. Hmmm. If I’m port­ing my data to my page/profile, then I’m not in viol­a­tion, right? It’d just be wheth­er someone ELSE was tak­ing my data and mov­ing it to their face­book page.

    Reply
  3. Brad Grier Avatar
    Brad Grier

    Hey Chris, thanks for stop­ping by 🙂

    My think­ing is that you can do whatever you want with your content..it’s yours. But if you redir­ect it to your Face­book page, then Face­book seems to own it.

    Your art­icles, pho­tos, etc, now become theirs too! So, you take a great shot of your cat and post it to your flickr account, which (via the flickr Face­book app) now appears on your Face­book page…which means that they now own your photo, and can use it in their advertising?

    If that were with­in my CC license, and CC did trump Face­book, they could­n’t do that because mine is a non-com­mer­cial, attri­bu­tion and share-alike license.

    But if it’s last in wins, then Face­book could do whatever they want.

    An inter­est­ing situ­ation, no?

    Reply
  4. Brad Grier Avatar
    Brad Grier

    Just had a thought of anoth­er scen­ario. What hap­pens if I grab your RSS feed and post it in MY face­book notes. You don’t know I’ve done it, yet Face­book TOS now says they own the content?

    Again, I’ve not read the TOS com­pletely, and there my be some­thing in it which states that I must be the rights own­er to post con­tent or link to feeds, but it still seems like a huge grey area.

    Reply

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