Lawyers and Para-legals of HN, what's your opinion on this; watermark all photos you upload to FB with a disclaimer saying something like:
"By leaving this picture accessible, Facebook agrees that I retain full copyrights, and Facebook can not use this picture for advertising purposes, all clauses of Facebooks EULA in contrary being void"
Would something like this work and be accepted in a court of law ?
It’s as ineffective and thus nonsensical as the “copyright notice” that typical consumers started to cut and paste into their bios few years back. By using their service, you’ve already accepted their agreement, to whatever extent it’s legally enforceable. I really doubt that it includes a clause that you can negate or place restrictions on the agreement within the content that you post using their service. It would make more sense to send them a letter if that’s really what you want to try to do. If you don’t want Facebook to use your image the best way is to not upload it to them.
IANAL, but for that to work you'd need, at a minimum, someone authorized to bind Facebook contractually (e.g, a corporate officer) to have read the watermark and left the picture accessible, and even that's less clear than if the acceptance was by action rather than inaction.
Watermarks have no specific legal merit and never did. People use them because it makes them feel better, copyright exists with or without the watermark and Facebook's terms (that you agreed to) apply with or without it.
Plus implicit agreements to a contract is a rabbit hole, and you'd never be able to show that a human working at Facebook ever witnessed this supposed contractual verbiage.
This reminds me a lot of those "share this image to stop Facebook selling your information to advertisers" meme that was going around a few years ago.
I can only imagine that this would just make the photos unusable (I imagine a "John Smith" printed diagonally on a photo, enough to make it 'viewable' by friends, but unusable by advertisers. Of course there is always photoshop, and I will assume that even if someone watermarks a photo like that, someone, somewhere can spend 10mins and process/edit the semi-transparent letters so as to 'remove' them from the picture.
I wonder if the better solution is to embed as much subtle inappropriate content in your photos as possible - not enough to traumatize grandma, but if every photo is now going to lead advertisers into a "there's a penis on the front of the Little Mermaid" problem, maybe that'll slow em down?
Nope. But in some jurisdictions consumer protection and data privacy laws ought to prevent FB doing this, their EULA notwithstanding.
However, bear in mind that this is from The Telegraph, which is a not a high quality news source. There is likely to be a significant element of misreporting, so I'd like to see a verifying story from a credible source before damning FB.
"By leaving this picture accessible, Facebook agrees that I retain full copyrights, and Facebook can not use this picture for advertising purposes, all clauses of Facebooks EULA in contrary being void"
Would something like this work and be accepted in a court of law ?