

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

======
mechanical_fish
Would it spoil the party to point out that Facebook's _original_ terms of
service were insane? [1] That they promised something that Facebook was unable
to deliver? They allowed you to post content to Facebook, wait until that
content was quoted, copied, pasted, or remixed by others, then pull the
content off and sue Facebook if any of those quotations, copies, or remixes
persisted anywhere on Facebook's site. Ask the MPAA how well that would have
worked out for you in practice.

We all know that removing something which has been posted to the web is like
removing the proverbial drop of food coloring from a swimming pool. With their
new TOS, Facebook is stating something that's been true all along: They're
running a swimming pool. Once your content is exposed to its userbase you
can't take that content back.

I am reminded of a passage in J. Michael Straczynski's screenwriting book
where he talks about how important it is to avoid sending unsolicited
manuscripts to movie or TV producers. They will send the manuscripts back
unopened [2] and refuse to deal with you again, because:

 _One individual I encountered had written a spec_ Terminator 3 _script,
hoping to either send it to producer James Cameron and later sue Cameron
because this person was sure this would be the next story or tempt Cameron to
sue him, which would force Cameron to read the script, after which he would be
so thoroughly blinded by the script's brilliance that he'd buy it instantly.
(No, I'm not making this up.)... Unsolicited manuscripts are the constant
nightmare of any producer._

Perhaps Facebook has become large and old enough to have had its first
encounter with such a copyright troll. The solution to this problem, as
employed by every producer in Hollywood, is to require a release form before
you'll read _anything_.

\---

[1] Note that I am not a lawyer. The lawyers in the audience are welcome to
explain that I'm wrong.

[2] "It will be returned in a larger envelope, unopened (although there will
often be a tiny tear in one of the corners of the original envelope, made by a
secretary to verify that it contained a script)." -- JMS

~~~
plesn
What you're pointing here, is that even a "non-evil" company can nearly be
forced by the sake of self-protection and simplicity to have abusive clauses.
Maybe this shows the need of active regulation and arbitration in the domain.

In France we have somthing supposed to ensure data privacy called "CNIL" (
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNIL> ). Is there some equivalent in the US?

~~~
mechanical_fish
I don't think we're talking about a data privacy issue here. Facebook's TOS,
old and new, states that its rights to use your data are "subject to your
privacy settings". The issue here is copyright, which is not the same thing.

Meanwhile, if you're saying that it would be great if we had a regulatory
regime that recognized the reality of the Internet -- where anything you
publish effectively belongs to the world and cannot thereafter be retracted or
centrally controlled -- amen to that! But that's not the world we live in. We
live in a world full of lawyers who mail C&D notices to indie filmmakers if
they happen to photograph a building or a sign or a person without getting a
signed release first; a world where a lot of modern art can't afford to
legally exist because it costs too much to clear the rights to all the
components of that art. Under those circumstances, I find it hard to blame
Facebook for throwing up their hands and demanding a waiver before you publish
anything on their platform.

~~~
plesn
It's true I would like to live in a world which would care about people rights
and privacy before copyrighted content; I know I'm pretty idealistic. But in
this case it seems to me they are fighting evil with a lot bigger evil.

------
plesn
A non-evil social network would have to be distributed and based on open
protocols: you could be @facebook.com but could interact with people on other
networks so that users would have choice. They could even have their own
server.

The net and the web were built like that, but now why are we building "jails"
within the compelling interactivity of the "web 2.0"?

There are numerous interesting protocols to build upon (openid, the extensible
XMPP..., etc..), and startups should use them and respect their users data.
Concerning social networks there seem to be some alternatives (Elgg,
OpenSocial APIs) but could a startup build something more open and still
profitable on those?

~~~
gaius
The thing all those interesting protocols have in common is that they mean
absolutely nothing to 99% of people who joined Facebook because that's where
their friends were, that's where photos are tagged and event invites are sent
from.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Plus, distributed protocols are significantly harder to engineer. You have to
design for the case where the remote provider of Function X isn't up, or
doesn't scale, or will decide to hate you if you send it too much traffic. You
have to formalize many APIs and fix them in stone, _much_ earlier in the
process than you otherwise would, because now you've got external services
that will depend on those APIs and will break if you change them. This will
tend to make big, open, distributed systems much less flexible and harder to
evolve over time.

When you combine _that_ with the fact that most customers just don't care --
not until after they've got a lot invested in your site, at which point you're
probably already a big success -- it's not surprising that the sites which
evolved into big winners did so by keeping themselves fairly insular. Why
spend money and time developing features that aren't important?

I'm not holding out hope for distributed versions of things like Facebook. Not
yet. It's not unimaginable that the user community will eventually embrace
such things, after they've had a lot more training in the downside of walled
gardens, but I think we're way too early in the Web 2.0 adoption cycle for
that. Right now I'd settle for a baby step: An export API that lets you dump
all your data out of a service in some sort of JSON or XML format. That would
be unusable for 99% of people, but at least it would let them back up their
data and hand it to some third party that might be able to read it for them.

~~~
brlewis
Atom and Media RSS are existing formats that let you export all kinds of data.
Already OurDoings uses FriendFeed as a social networking hub, but thanks to
Media RSS and SUP, you could plug in a different hub if you wanted to. And, of
course, from the FriendFeed side you could plug in a different source for
photos/stories of your doings if you wanted to.

~~~
unalone
Somebody downvoted you, because you _are_ wrong, but you make a point that's
worth debate.

The problem is that nobody cares about Atom. Nobody cares about Media RSS or
FriendFeed. The people that use services like that are in the slim minority,
because it takes too long to understand, it takes too long to set up, and the
biggest problem with open systems is that you don't retain tyrannical control
over the information, which hurts your interface.

I've been kind of an outspoken critic of FriendFeed for this reason. It's kind
of the culmination of these "open aggregation" sites. The problem is, when you
put them all together, you wind up with a slush pile. You get nothing. A bunch
of tech-obsessed people will find value; the average user will find nothing.

The theoretical solution is to reverse engineer every single site. That is to
say: when I get tagged in a photo on Facebook, then show the tagged photos in
the interface. If a friend uploads photos from Facebook and Flickr, then I see
both of them - but not as a feed; I see it in a unified photo place.
Furthermore, I need to be able to interact with those photos simultaneously.
Say I'm looking at a photo gallery that contains photos both from Flickr and
Facebook. The system would have to detect duplicates, unify the interface, and
make it so that I can both tag the photo and add comments Flickr-style. It
would also probably have to detect which comments are coming from what site,
so that when I post my reply comments, it doesn't seem like I'm messed-up or
out-of-sync - it _could_ add two comment streams, but that's cluttered and
messes up the interface.

Now imagine this but for every single site a person would use. Integrated
Tweets, Tumblr posts, Facebook notes, possibly Last.FM songs. Most optimally,
integrated private messaging between the sites. And the challenge is _not_
getting all that data - as you say, it's publicly available. The problem is
unifying that data and producing a comprehensive grasp of it for the user.
_Facebook_ can do that easily, because they have complete closed-door control
of that information. They know exactly how you'll be commenting on things,
they know the actionflow for uploading photos and tagging people in notes and
posting items and whathave you. With any attempt to duplicate that openly, you
lose that absolute knowledge unless you're brilliant and figure out the one
unifying thread between every single site you connect to, and that's a pretty
damn tall order.

 _The people who use FriendFeed as a social hub do not understand what people
use social networking for._ I've heard this argument a lot, that FriendFeed is
a new-wave social hub. It's not. For most people, social is about personal
connections. And that's not the same as "I know the person uploading this
photo." It's "What was Mike up to last night?" "What is Christie saying about
Valentine's Day?" "Who's writing what?" You could argue that FriendFeed shows
all of these, in a way, but it misses this unification that I'd say is
necessary. You can see photos and Twitter posts and blog entries, but you
don't have this interface that says "This is Facebook, this is your portal,
you can do anything you want to from this site, here's everything from your
friends." In some ways it's more primitive than FriendFeed, and that's the
_point_ : people don't like complex systems. On FriendFeed there's a barrier
between joining and doing. Not true on Facebook.

This is going to be the problem with OurDoings, too. I hope you guys get a
good userbase, because you have a neat service, but at the same time you're
largely using other service's photos, or that's the impression that I get.
You're even importing from other photo _aggregation_ sites, which I find
silly. Now, the problem is that for most users, if they're putting their stuff
online, they'll _stay_ there. You use Twitter if you want to post short
blurbs, you use Flickr to put up your photos, and then if you want to read
other blurbs or see other photos, you stay there. I mean, stories get told on
Facebook all the time. Not "I remember when this was taken: such and such a
thing happened," but "Man oh man was I drunk." That's the story that people
care about, and that people will reminisce about.

tl;dr, exporting data might sounds snazzy but most people just don't care
enough.

~~~
brlewis
You bring up a lot of topics worth debating, and I hope to answer a lot of
them in detail at some point. Due to lack of time I'm just going to answer the
direct OurDoings comment. We don't import from other sites. Hellotxt.com and
ping.fm push to us, but that's what they're for. A lot of people upload using
the Picasa _desktop client_ ; we don't import from Picasaweb.

~~~
unalone
Aha! Gotcha. Sorry, I misinterpreted some of the stuff I saw on signup.

------
CalmQuiet
Well, it's a natural power grab. If you _can_ grab it, why not: who knows what
financial benefits may appear later.

Some day a 21st Century "Diary of Ann Frank" might start with notes made on
FB. Won't FB want to take advantage of print/advert/movie rights. $$$

"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

~~~
jacquesm
they may want it and they may claim they've got it but I highly doubt it would
fly. The manufacturer of the paper you write on does not get to claim
copyright, you do.

~~~
zzkt
Did you actually read the terms of service?

~~~
unalone
Yeah. They're very "You're not allowed to get mad at us if your stuff stays on
the database after you're gone, because it's really hard for us to make sure
it all disappears." If you're paranoid/have never used a site with TOS, that
sounds like "We want to steal your creative ideas," but I assure you that if
Facebook ever did something like that, they would get pounded hard and lose
users. HN had this exact discussion with the Gmail TOS, I believe, and people
were worried that Google would be stealing their emailed poetry.

Sites really aren't evil. You've got to trust me on this, most sites aren't
saying "How can we potentially steal a million dollars in the off-chance that
one of our users posts up a movie script as a note rather than, say, sending
it off to an executive?" Rather, they're saying, "Look, we're getting a lot of
people who're being dicks about how we keep their data so that if they want to
return their account magically comes back, and we think that it's better to
keep that data than to remove it, because that way the people who delete
accounts stupidly can come back and be happy they don't have to start again.
At the same time, it's true that we're retaining data we shouldn't retain. So
let's just add to our TOS that we're allowed to do that, since most people
won't care, and since it means we can provide a useful service that'll help
more people than it will piss off."

~~~
indigoviolet
Thank you, one person with sense amidst all this stupid trigger happy
paranoia.

------
indigoviolet
Facebook's response: <http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54434097130>

------
lgriffith
The Cloud absorbs all. Once you live there, your life becomes one with the
Cloud. You no longer belong to you. The only answer is never to have joined
the Cloud. It is already too late. Resistance is futile.

------
trickjarrett
I want to understand the legal structure that allows this. The TOS I agreed to
most certainly did not agree to the permanent control of this data. Why am I
now bound to this new one?

~~~
jerf
The TOS that you did sign almost certainly contained a clause that said
something to the effect of "You further agree that we may make any change to
these terms in the future, and you will continue to be bound by them."

If that bothers you, bad news: Damn near every contract you sign nowadays
contains that clause.

The better terms of service will permit you to at least cancel the contract
after a term change if you do not consent. My CC contract had that, and I bet
it's because it's required by law. But I haven't seen that many other places.

Now, this might sound like a horrible clause. And it probably is. On the other
hand, contracts have a real need to be mutable, and for something like the
Facebook TOS, you're basically dealing with millions of parties to the
contract that simply _can't_ be meaningfully "informed" about the nature of
the contract or the nature of the changes. So, it's not just a problem with
evil, greedy companies, it's also a problem with the fact that people are
essentially incapable of understanding the TOS (due to either time or a
literal inability to comprehend) _and_ our legal system simply requires some
sort of TOS to exist. The problem is complex and does not admit a simple
solution.

~~~
Retric
They can say what they want but such changes to the contract is not
enforceable in the US. If you sign up and they change the TOS you can use the
old TOS and force them to remove your account.

~~~
gaius
No you can't, not really. What about comments you left on someone's wall? What
about replies you wrote that are now in someone's inbox? What about tags you
added to other people's photos?

Once you start to participate in something like Facebook, you really don't own
the interactions you have via it. If anyone does "your network" does, but
since that isn't an entity in any meaningful sense, Facebook the corporation
must do.

------
pierrefar
Well that $15b valuation has to come from somewhere. What this says is they
want to be a media company with millions of producers.

~~~
gaius
Facebook wants not to be sued if someone's boss sees something they shouldn't
and fires that someone. That's the real reason for this policy. By uploading
content to FB you absolve them of responsibility for whom they show it to.

Seriously, you think a million bad cameraphone pictures of people getting
drunk are worth $15Bn?

~~~
pierrefar
I never said that, or more accurately, the sarcasm about them being a media
company didn't come through in my sentence.

There is also the element of trust. What you describe is a sensible thing to
protect against, but I have that gut feeling that the new policy is covering a
new approach FB may take. Something feels wrong with having this wording of
this policy, so I mistrust the intentions behind this new policy until
evidence to the contrary emerges. I'm not holding my breath.

------
Rod
Would it be too far-fetched to claim that Facebook's evil terms of use create
an opportunity for a new photo-sharing platform?

Facebook makes it very easy to share photos. What if one could still share
photos with friends on Facebook, but these photos were not uploaded to
Facebook's server?

~~~
mseebach
A quick google reveals serveral Flickr for Facebooks apps.. but I think a
major value-driver for photos on FB is tagging of friends, and the "see all
photos of..", "see photos of NN and me" features, and I think those are
difficult/impossible to tap into without using FB's own photo app (although I
don't know).

An idea could be to make an app that will upload deliberately crippled (low
resolution, watermark), yet recognizable, pictures to FB, and a high-quality
copy on Flickr, so tags work, but when you go the to picture, there's a note
"I won't let FB own my stuff, see a high quality version of this pic on
(Flickr-link) that _I_ own. Posted by CoolPhotoApp."..

~~~
unalone
If I was on Facebook and a friend of mine started doing that, I would unfriend
him for being a dick. If he tagged me in a low-res picture, so that all my
friends looking for my photos would see a blurry me in the mix, I'd be pretty
pissed off. Or worse: I'd ban the application, as is my prerogative, and
suddenly I don't see any of these photos at all and that app destroys photos
entirely.

------
TweedHeads
Like Firefox did, just create an open source social experience and we will
move our friends and family to a more open and secure place.

Never underestimate an angry customer...

~~~
unalone
TweedHeads, it's really cute that you think that's why people went to Firefox,
the whole open thing, but the average user doesn't know what plugins are. The
big switch to FF came when it had tabs and IE 6 didn't. That's when I changed.
It also rendered pages more accurately and loaded faster than IE 6. Nobody
cares that it was open, and chances are people didn't care that it was secure.
The idea of security is that you don't actively notice it.

Facebook is secure already, and nobody cares that it's closed. If it was a
shitty site that was _also_ closed, then maybe an "open social experience"
would come in handy, but Facebook also happens to be the best-designed popular
site that's ever been made, it runs oily-smooth, and it has five hundred
bazillion users.

 _Never underestimate an angry customer..._

Like the 10 million angry customers that protested when Facebook redesigned
and lost its little guy logo? Or that protested that you can't change Facebook
to other colors? Because I have friends that joined those groups, and they're
still on Facebook. "Mildly irritated" customers can be underestimated, for the
most part. They don't do anything.

~~~
TweedHeads
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485460>

Never underestimate an angry customer...

