Facebook Terms of Use

If you’re using Facebook as your primary photo storage, you might want to look closely at the Terms of Use.

Under the terms which every Facebook user agrees to before using the site:

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. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

What this means in person-speak is that anything you upload to the site, including all your photos, can be used by Facebook at any time, for any reason, without warning you. (The Terms of Use are your warning.) They can use your face in an ad, a brochure or the company newsletter. They can also modify your image.

Of course Facebook is not a nefarious scheme to steal people’s photos. But it’s good to be aware that your photos become the property of Facebook when they’re on the site. However, as soon as you remove pictures from the site, Facebook has no more rights to them.

By contrast, the Flickr/Yahoo Terms of Use state that:

Yahoo! does not claim ownership of Content you submit or make available for inclusion on the Service. However, with respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service, you grant Yahoo! the following worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license(s), as applicable: … With respect to photos, graphics, audio or video you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service other than Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available. This license exists only for as long as you elect to continue to include such Content on the Service and will terminate at the time you remove or Yahoo! removes such Content from the Service.

All of which means, I think, that the site can’t use your photos for purposes you didn’t intend. In other words, they can’t use your work in an ad.

If there are lawyers or speakers of legalese reading this, please feel free to chime in with further clarifications of each site’s terms of use.

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