Who owns your content?

Facebook is in a tight spot after users question it about ownership of data

In A Study in Scarlet, which was published way back in December 1887, Sherlock Holmes says, 'There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.' And this seems to be reflected in the way in which Facebook is behaving these days, as compared to how GeoCities did a decade ago when it was acquired by Yahoo.

Apparently, in January 1999, when Yahoo bought GeoCities, they are said to have allegedly changed the terms of service conditions to state that the content put on any GeoCities site would be owned by Yahoo. Thanks to the public outrage of the people who had their pages on GeoCities, Yahoo did a rollback.

History repeats itself

And today, a decade later, the issue is rearing its ugly head again. As per the Terms of Use (facebook.com/terms.php) that we saw yesterday, "You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service..." In other words, put anything on Facebook and it belongs to them. They can do with this information what they please without consulting you.

Such cases bring to the fore one important questionu2014who owns information? You, the creator, or the service provider who helps you to publish it? Common sense says that you own the information after all, the government can't claim that it owns your car because the said car runs on fuel provided by the government and on roads laid by the government, right?

Legal angle

The New York Times, while discussing this issue, quoted Greg Lastowka, an associate professor at the Rutgers School of Law as stating that "Most Web sites today offer terms of service that are designed to protect and further the interests of the company writing the terms, and most people simply agree to terms without reading them." In many ways, this is a crying shame most of us are at best people who want to keep in touch with our friends and relatives with the aid of technology. Chances are high that we have no way of understanding the legal language that is crafted for companies like Facebook by their lawyers.

It is high time that governments around the world put an end to such nonsense. What we need is a law that governs the Internet, one that is propagated by various countries and managed by a global entity like the UN, which will address these issues. It should be clear that, on a social networking site, information should be owned by the creator and not by anybody else.

Users matter

This is not the first time that Facebook has put both its feet firmly in its mouth. In November 2007, it introduced Beacon and was accused of collecting too much information for advertisers. Wikipedia also notes that in May 2008, BBC's technology program Click demonstrated that personal details of Facebook users and their friends could be stolen by submitting malicious applications. What BBC did was create a data mining application called Miner, and anybody who ran this ran the risk of exposing personal details of himself and his friends because all this was sent back to the people who wrote the application via e-mail. While this application was created by BBC to show that such malicious activity is indeed possible, somebody else could put the harvested data to more dangerous use.

Let's just hope that Facebook understands that it needs to address user concerns carefully if it wants to retain them.