The Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998 extended copyright terms in the United States by 20 years. Since the Copyright Act of 1976, copyright would last for the life of the author plus 50 years, or 75 years for a work of corporate authorship. The Act extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier.[1] Copyright protection for works published prior to January 1, 1978 was increased by 20 years to a total of 95 years from their publication date.

IANL (my variant: “I ain’t no lawyer”) either.

say a poet posts their poems on the site, then gets famous, and dies. Can FB publish a book – use the poets now famous poem in an ad and not have to pay for it?

No on one, and maybe, but probably no on two. Copyright in the US currently extends for the period of the author’s life plus 100 years, so for 100 years after your poet died, her estate would *own* the poem and have final say on any book sales. Taking an extreme view, FB could attempt to use the poem (provided it was uploaded to FB at some point by the author or her designates) in a FB advertisement and not pay the poet’s estate, but they would certainly have a legal challenge on their hands as this is obviously not in the spirit of the agreement.

More importantly, the vast majority of content on FB doesn’t meet this test in that it’s mostly noise that is of interest to a very select group of people. That’s a nice way of saying, “get over yourself, nobody cares about your poetry/etchings/photographs/wood carvings/short films/rock band.” I pray to God that FB decides my content is so popular it’s worth stealing. PLEASE let me be so lucky!

Finally, FB is a totally appropriate place to publish your content. Why keep any eyeballs from seeing your stuff? You want as many people looking at your art as possible. Publish to wordpress, facebook, flickr, youtube, vimeo, twitter…

I posted something about it to remind people that while Facebook is a cool tool to update the status of your breakfast, it shouldn’t be an avenue to publish your content.

That is what WordPress is for!

YouTube’s TOS are linked in my post. Read them and you’ll find very similar language.

You asked what possible legal situation could arise. I’m not FB’s lawyer so I can’t necessarily think of any either, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t. I found some possibilities reading comments out there on the web though. Here’s one:

“the basic idea is that things you upload may end up residing on servers outside of Facebook’s direct control. These broad rights make it so that you can’t sue Facebook for some cached content on some other server”

I don’t know if that’s their reasoning or not, I’m just pointing out that scenarios can exist that you and I aren’t thinking of.

Your other point about FB selling your photos as stock photos is nothing you need to worry about. The agreement grants them the right to repurpose your work, but you still *own* the work. Their non-exclusive rights aren’t transferable. Here’s where I would really defer to a lawyer, but in order for FB to sell your photos as stock images, they would have to in turn enter into an agreement with whoever they were selling your work to, granting *them* the right to use your work. Nothing in this TOS grants them that ability that I can see. They can use your images for their own promotional purposes, but they can’t transfer their rights to anyone else w/o your approval.

“You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.”

I agree that this is covering their butts in a legal sense. I also agree that this language was in the TOS before, the new element is that of saving your content after you delete it.

First of all, why would they need to save the content after it is deleted? What legal issues could this prevent? I could understand keeping it for 90 days or so just in case someone posted pictures of a robbery, rape, or other crime, but why should they be allowed to keep photos and videos indefinitely? Besides, it costs them a lot of money to store all this information on their servers, why would they do that on a permanent basis if they weren’t making any money off of it?

Secondly, just because they are covering their butts legally doesn’t mean they are not going to sell them as stock photography to make some extra cash. I HAD professional portrait pictures (see here: http://www.swichkow.com) on Facebook until today. These were on my profile so prospective employers could see my work on more than just my website. Should I leave these professional pictures up and just “trust” that they aren’t going to sell them for profit?

In conclusion, I see no reason why they implemented the new provisions into their TOS and I see no other social networking sites that claim such power over the content posted on their site.

http://www.swichkow.com/Blog
http://www.twitter.com/swichi293