It happened again.
You may have noticed last week that your Facebook friends—maybe even some that aren’t always among the more gullible—started blowing up your news feed with wordy copyright disclaimers, supposedly protecting your privacy and intellectual property rights. They read something like this:
As of October 2, 2015, at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, I hereby declare that my copyright is attached to my personal information, pictures, videos, and posts, both past and future, as a result of the Berner Convention. By this statement, I give notice to Facebook: it is strictly forbidden to disclose, copy, distribute, disseminate, or take any other action against me based on this profile and/or its contents. . . If you do not post this statement at least once, you are tacitly allowing the use of your photos as well as the information contained in the profile status updates.
The disclaimers certainly look official, with all that legal jargon, but the fact of the matter is that they mean absolutely nothing. And they’ve been around before. CBS News reported that the copyright hoax first popped up in 2012.
Your stuff is still yours
But Facebook is not attempting to take ownership of your stuff. “The insane frenzy to post some kind of warning about either ‘privacy’ or ‘copyright’ is, legally speaking, pointless,” says attorney Elura Nanos.
“Artists who create art and photographers who take photographs have an automatic copyright in the intellectual property they have created,” says Nanos. “A person who owns a copyright—either because they were the original artist or because they purchased the copyright from someone else—has a set of rights that follow, including the right to copy, distribute, perform, and profit from the work.”
Copyright lawyer Autumn Witt Boyd agrees. “Posting this [disclaimer] notice is totally unnecessary,” says Boyd, “because Facebook does not claim copyright ownership in your posts, videos, or photos.” Even if Facebook tried to claim copyright ownership of your content, you can’t change the Facebook terms you agreed to simply by posting something contrary in your status update. “That’s the whole idea behind a ‘term of service,'” says Nanos. “It’s a condition upon which you must agree in order to use the service.”
Make sense? “It’s pretty simple: if you use Facebook you are bound by their rules,” says Nanos. “If you don’t want to be bound by those rules, you don’t have to be—but you’ll need to close your Facebook account.”
Facebook’s fine print is in your favor
Really, everything you need to know about Facebook, privacy, and copyright concerns has been there since you joined. Facebook’s Statements of Rights and Responsibilities section lays out the terms and conditions regarding intellectual property (IP) content:
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.
This means that by using Facebook, you explicitly agree that you will be bound by these terms,” says Nanos. “You are still the copyright owner of your intellectual property, but by using Facebook, you are granting Facebook the right to use your intellectual property.”
And that is simply the nature of the beast. If Facebook didn’t “use” your content, as specified in the terms, then it would cease to serve its purpose as a social forum. Social media is a public venue, and most Facebook users appreciate the ability to share personal information and photos with friends, family, and others.
But do take note of the last sentence of the terms: unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it. We warn our kids about this and should take heed ourselves—once personal information is shared, you lose a bit of control over what happens next. You may permanently close your Facebook account, but anything you shared while it was active could very well have been kept and/or re-shared by your Facebook friends.
Bottom line, Facebook users do retain the copyright in the personal content and photos they post, but they have already agreed to Facebook’s non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that content. So, share with care.
Photo courtesy of georgemphoto / Shutterstock.com
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