This post started out as a well planned, structured article. It’s been rewritten several times, and each time I’ve cut it down more. The bottom line is that I’m worried about Facebook’s terms of use.
I’m fairly addicted to new social networking site Facebook. I’m also quite loyal – the two concepts are not the same.

In the past two weeks I’ve been having some problems with my account, which has led me to thoroughly read Facebook’s terms of use. Although I’m not a lawyer, I am concerned about some of the language:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

My amateur reading of this is that you cede all rights on all content you publish on Facebook. The company can then basically do what they want with the user’s photographs, discussions or personal data.

It goes on to state that you can remove your content at which point this license expires, but Facebook reserves the right to retain copies of your content. This (probably) refers to caching, but it also means you have to trust Facebook for not abusing it.

Perhaps this is just a stock standard terms of use document, which no one has really scrutinised. I hope Facebook made a slight error when they published these terms.

However, if owning all rights to the content is exactly Facebook’s intention, it would mean they could sell our content and our data legally.

Perhaps it’s only a mistake, similar to the original YouTube terms of use. What worries me is Facebook’s use of the words like ‘fully-paid’ and ‘publicly display’.