Facebook’s New TOS Worrisome for Mom’s

Posted on February 16th, 2009 by Paula Skaper

We have to find a better way of managing online copyright than Facebook’s new Terms of Service. This give away all your rights to us approach isn’t new – I’ve been dealing with the debate since I first started negotiating web deals over 15 years ago. Back then it was professional writers who were up in arms – something about giving way their right to profit from their own work in exchange for the grand sum of $0.03 per word (yeah that does say three cents). If only we’d known what a great deal it was, back then.

Now we’ve created this thing called UGC and it’s a fancy way of saying we give away the right to profit from our own work at all ever in exchange for no compensation whatsoever. The legal ramifications are huge – too big a debate to tackle in this blog. But I must confess, my first response came as a mom not a web professional. Why? Because, among other roles in my life, I’m the mom or the aunt to a plethora of emerging teenagers for whom Facebook is the primary method of communication among friends. And because teenagers’ judgment today isn’t any better than it was when we were teens. Only now when they do dumb things, the proof will belong to Facebook forever.

Think about it – your child is out with friends at a local mall and one of them (not your child) takes a video of another one pretending to shoplift, then posts it to his Facebook profile. Another friend tags your child in the background laughing at the antics of his compadres. (And to all of you reading this and thinking “what kind of idiot…”, please refer to the comment about teen judgment in the last paragraph) Now you check in on your little darling’s Facebook account and voila! Inappropriate content. What do you do – remove the tag, have a discussion with your child about how dumb that was and how taken out of context, the video makes it look as though he and his friends think stealing is funny regardless of what the truth of the act was. Call the other kids folks and ask that the video be removed? Thing is, even if they comply Facebook still owns that movie and has no legal obligation to protect the context or veracity of the content.

Now fast forward a few years and your little darling is applying for an ethics scholarship when, ugh, up surfaces this photo that proves his teen rebellion? Too far-fetched? Think back to the recent Canadian national election and the number of candidates who were embarrassed by stupid things they’d done decades earlier. And those candidates didn’t have Facebook to deal with.

One of the benefits of Facebook is supposed to be that it allows you to protect who has access to your information – how can that be true if the first thing you are required to do is give away ownership of that information in perpetuity. We need to educate our children early about the magnitude of the concept of moral rights and discuss with them why professional content producers hold them in such high regard.

And maybe it’s time that we, as adults, stopped for a moment and gave some thought to what we casually post for friends and colleagues to read and view and question whether we’re really ready to hand over ownership of our vacation photos, our wedding photos, our company profiles and our family history to Facebook.

Tagged with: copyright • facebook • Social Media • social networking • youth

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