Terms of Contention: Who Owns Uploaded Content?

Terms of use and privacy policies, how often do you read these terms before agreeing to them? Most of us would admit we don’t read the fine print even when it’s prominent large type. But when a community member does pay attention to a change in the terms of service and gets 100,000 other people to pay attention also, you’d better believe that the originator of the terms and policies are going to take notice. That scenario happened just last week for members of Facebook, one of the largest social media sites with 175 million active users and the most visited site in January 2009 with 1.2 billion visits according to Compete.com.

Democratic Approval for Social Networking Usage

Rather than a Terms of Use statement, the phrase for the future terms on Facebook will be “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.” Now, to get a user-voted statement approved, it needs 30% of active users to vote on it, which is 53 million people according to this article on Top Tech News. That number is 23 times the number of “fans” that Facebook has on Facebook. Yow! The voting closes March 29, and you had to be a member on February 25th to be eligible to vote.

The content “ownership” isn’t all that contentious, in my mind. It’s similar to how you treat email – you send a message to a friend, then delete it from your “Sent” box, but it still exists on your friend’s email server. As this Scientific American blog entry points out, ” The terms still indicate that Facebook can make copies of member content and, even if a member removes content from the site, Facebook can still retain archived copies of that information. Facebook isn’t claiming to own that information, but it isn’t promising to delete that info either.”

Watch out for a viral message that you’re in violation

And now for the Public Service portion of this blog entry. If you’re on Facebook and see a message from one of your Facebook friends that you’re in violation of the Terms and Conditions, do not “Click for Details.” It’s a virus that someone has engineered.

Sony’s Network Policy

Sony had a similar uproar from users over the network policy changes that occured before a new game called LittleBigPlanet was released last fall. For a game whose premise contains aspects of sharing creations, the terms that players agreed to were vital to its success. One blogger, Dean Longmore, a technical writer no less, talked about his concerns last October in “LittleBigRipoff? Sony can sell your user content” where he noted that the terms say that “Sony may sell subscription services or gain advertising revenue related to your content.” It seems that Sony hasn’t gone so far as to sell user content, nor does it yet allow users to create their own “stickers” by uploading images to the game. So it could be that this contention in the terms of use have perhaps limited gameplay to an extent.

What do you think? Are you concerned about your rights to one day delete uploaded content? Or is this uproar going to settle out as more trust is built between companies and their customers?