Last week, someone I am working on a project with suggested that we start a Facebook page and post some of the projects photos to it. I reacted very badly!!
Here is a quote from the Facebook rules and regulations, found at: http://www.facebook.com/legal/terms
For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
YIKES!!!!
The next day, Neil Steinberg in the Sun Times wrote a column titled:
I do own the copyright on this,right?
In it he discussed a guy who put a copyright notice on his Facebook page and compared it to “nailing a notice on your door that the mortgage that you agreed to that was $1500.00 is now $150.00. Nice try!
You sign your rights away to Facebook when you join, and the only way you get out of it is to take your page down!
Just to add insult to injury, the new Photoshop User declares:
Facebook strips out camera metadata when you upload a photo, meaning that metadata crawlers can’t successfully search Facebook photo galleries for camera metadata.
So, I have a Facebook page that I almost never look at, and have never posted a photo to, although photos of me keep on cropping up on it, for some reason. I have over 2000 friends, although I don’t know who more than half of them are!
But it is a necessary evil in the world today (I guess to try to appear hip and with it). People continually invite me to things that I find out about a few weeks after they are over- it seems that this is the go-to way of communication today. I’m not really buying into it!