Facebook, Redux

3 thoughts on “Facebook, Redux”

  1. The copyright issue doesn’t really affect me that much, since I don’t really consider whatever it is I do at Facebook a creative activity. In fact, I’m still struggling with finding an answer to the “what problem does Facebook solve?” question.

  2. My guideline for internet use in general (which also applies to facebook) is not to post anything that I wouldn’t want my mother, students, or employer to see. I find facebook mildly entertaining, but I definitely wouldn’t qualify it as valuable. Also, I find my rule for internet use in general negates any worry over their slightly shady proprietary use laws.

  3. That’s actually standard practice for any type of hosted service like facebook — Myspace has almost exactly the same agreement, although also includes an explanation as to why — because without, they couldn’t do things like RSS feeds, compress or otherwise modify photos, distribute the data you’ve uploaded, or … do anything, really.

    MySpace has a pretty good explanation as to why they have that in their license here: http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=misc.terms

    And, for a site that is actually useful (since god knows neither MySpace or Facebook are good for anything other than Being Annoying)… Flickr has the same licensing agreements. (See http://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/utos/utos-173.html)

    It’s standard practice, and doesn’t mean that you’ve given away your right to any sort of ownership — just that they have a license to use said data in a way that without which, the site couldn’t exist.

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