Info, Law, IP & Ethics

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/TECH/02/17/facebook.terms.service/art.facebook.gi.jpg

Few weeks ago we briefly discussed about facebook’s TOS in class, and one of them caught my attention. “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”).” Anyone has some knowledge about image licensing will know Facebook is obviously taking advantage of its users here. If you take good photos and put it on the internet. Someone sees them and wants to use them. Normally the licensing fee can range from $10 to hundreds of dollars, depends on the quality/size of the image and how famous you are. And, they should pay you EVERYTIME they use it if there is no other specific agreement. So, you can image how much money Facebook saves here and how much money you lose for uploading photos to Facebook.

As a person who likes taking photos and share them on Facebook, I don’t feel very comfortable about this statement. I also wonder how other photo sharing websites determined their TOS, especially for more professional purpose. So I did some research on Flicker and Picasa‘s image licensing policy, and found out they both support Creative Commons, which means users can control how many rights they want to give away for their photos. This sounds a lot fairer to me. Flicker does something even better. They have an agreement with Getty Image, which is a famous stock photo agency, last year. Gettty Image’s client can search and use images from Flickr site, and Flickr’s user can make money by licensing their works to Getty Image. It’s win-win situation for both sites. Back to our discussion of Facebook, although Facebook is more like a social site than photo sharing site, with its popularity and rapid increasing users, it would be good if they can think more about the fair interest for their users, at least I would appreciate that.