This message was seen at the homescreen of my Facebook page this morning. I’ll be joining the Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities group.

CNN story about it

Perez Hilton did the world of Facebook users a huge service yesterday by calling into attention something that a lot of us photographers were already aware of: Facebook’s horrible rights grabbing Terms of Service agreement.

What is that you say? Quite simply, its that legal agreement one needs to accept in order to be granted an account on the popular social networking site. Now, I’m no attorney and I don’t read the agreement on every piece of software I install, so maybe I have little to say on the matter, but that’s never stopped me before.

The main rub here is that Facebook claims to have ownership of all of the photographs you upload onto the site. That means your personal, family snapshots are theirs - to sell, license, modify etc. for perpetuity. Even if you shut down your site or pull the images down. Not cool.

Perez, who kinda interestingly enough has been sued for copyright infringement in the past, suggests boycotting Facebook. I wouldn’t go that far, I think Facebook is a really useful tool to keep up to date with your social networks (and to find interesting links and news online), but I do think it would be smart for people to make a big stink about this. Its worth noting that Hilton himself has not quit Facebook.

Now, Facebook will claim that they need to have terms like this in their agreement in order to cover themselves legally and operate as they do. Bull. Plenty of other sites have perfectly fair TOS agreements and Facebook is no different. Facebook needs to rewrite these terms and not just issue a simple PR statement.

I won’t be pulling my photos off Facebook, but if see them licensing my photos I will be suing them anyway (for the record, I don’t think this is likely).

Admittedly it would be an uphill legal battle, but I don’t place much weight on those TOS agreements because I don’t have any choice but to accept their terms. In my business, contracts are a fair negotiation between two equal parties. Facebook’s agreement does not treat me with that same respect.

Thanks Rob.