Facebook ‘withdraws’ data changes – 18 February 2009, BBC News

The Value of Human Readable Deeds – 18 February 2009, Fred Benenson, Creative Commons

This group [Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities] is for people to give input on Facebook’s terms of use. These terms are meant to serve as the governing document for how the service is used by people around the world.

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts with us [regarding changing Facebook's terms of use].

Here are responses to some of the things you’ve written below:

1. You own your information. Facebook does not. This includes your photos and all other content.

2. Facebook doesn’t claim rights to any of your photos or other content. We need a license in order to help you share information with your friends, but we don’t claim to own your information.

3. We won’t use the information you share on Facebook for anything you haven’t asked us to. We realize our current terms are too broad here and they make it seem like we might share information in ways you don’t want, but this isn’t what we’re doing.

4. We will not share your information with anyone if you deactivate your account. If you’ve already sent a friend a message, they’ll still have that message. However, when you deactivate your account, all of your photos and other content are removed.

5. We apologize for the confusion around these issues. We never intended to claim ownership over people’s content even though that’s what it seems like to many people. This was a mistake and we apologize for the confusion.

On point #2, why can’t Facebook adopt Creative Commons licensing? This would achieve four ends:

  1. It would start educating Facebook users en masse on how to license personal works out to the public domain. This would include photos, videos, and other content shared on Facebook.
  2. By selecting/unselecting the “noncommercial” option, this would allow/disallow users the rights to grant Facebook (as a commercial entity) its own ownership of user content. Such an option could easily be trackable to Facebook’s database either through electronic fingerprinting or basic coding.  Noncommercial licensing should be the default, with users able to opt-out (thus, opting into commercial licensing).
  3. With regards to eventual expansion over an “open platform”/OpenID, CC commercial licensing would, in the future, enable Facebook to share user content over networks, while ultimately retaining the content creators’ approval for the content to be shared elsewhere.
  4. Facebook would throw major weight behind this licensing standard, ultimately forcing other user-created content-based web sites to reevaluate their own approaches to licensing.

This seems like such a no-brainer, simple, transparent solution to Facebook’s terms of use problems in dealing with user-created content.