FACEBOOK DOESN’T CLAIM TO ‘OWN YOUR HOUSE’ BUT JUST WANTS TO USE IT, SUBLET IT OR SELL IT AND ITS CONTENTS….FOREVER.

A while back you may remember that Prince caused something of a media-backlash at the end of an otherwise successful 2007 (Planet Earth album giveaway, record-breaking run at the O2 in London) when he suddenly threw an impressive strop about users posting his videos on the likes of YouTube.

At the time, it was not only the media who fell over themselves to laugh at this has-been rock star who didn’t seem to understand the brave new world of Social Networking in Web 2.0.

Even Prince’s own fans were outraged to the point of all-out war with their muse, forming a user-group called PFU (get it?) and causing such a stink with press-releases objecting to Prince’s use of a rights-enforcement agent called Websheriff, that, in the end, Prince uncharacteristically took it to heart actually issuing a single, ‘P-FUNK’ which dealt with the furore.

What many missed and Prince himself didn’t make explicit enough that what was at issue was YouTube’s passing on of responsibility for posted content to users while simultaneously availing of the free content to bolster their share valuations on the stock market. Prince certainly wasn’t the only one worried about piracy and dwindled returns in the once super-lucrative entertainment industry but was, perhaps, one of the few to question publicly the new deal being offered by the whales of Web 2.0 to both entertainment-sharks protecting their assets and user minnows posting their old VHS tapes online.

The view Prince failed to properly highlight amid the fallout was that users were now being used by the Web 2.0 giants to get copyrighted entertainment-corps content for free as well as the user-generated content for which the likes of YouTube had set up as the facilitators of what 90′s media commentators had heralded as the ‘coming revolution of users as producers’. 

Although YouTube has now set in place a scheme for rewarding content providers, this had, by April last year, paid out only $1 million, and most of that to the entertainment companies even while YouTube’s valuation upon sale to Google  in October 2006 had been $1.65 billion and at a time when YouTube was pulling in something in the order of $100 million in revenue from ads displayed alongside user’s uploaded videos (including Prince’s).

This week’s furore  about a stealthy update to the Terms of Service on Facebook suggests that users’ and media minds alike may be focussed somewhere around the vicinity of Prince’s in 2007. Facebook’s whale seems to have been caught in the act, in this case, of gobbling up not only the right to license users’ content while they’re on the service (a common claim of the Web 2.0 corps) but even after users have deleted their content and left Facebook. In fact, Facebook’s ToS update extended their licensing ‘agreement’ with users to claiming the right to sub-license content commercially and even create ‘derivative works’ from it forever.

And all of this apparently without so much as a Status Update announcement (the killer feature beloved of afficianados) on Facebook itself.

Understandably, some FB users were a little put out but it’s not the first time Facebook has pushed the envelope a little too far toward the edge of the desk. Previously caught, in 2006, with their hand in the privacy till, their Beacon service allowed other users to see what you’d been buying, but showed either a scant understanding of basic privacy issues or a reckless disregard for users’ privacy, period. 

By June 2008, a Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest group was claiming 22 separate breaches of privacy law by Facebook, based around the way the company collects and shares information about users without first gaining permission or offering explanation on how it will be used.

This week’s revelations have set the bar higher. Facebook claimed it needs to change its ToS because of the way it offers service. It wants to keep what you’ve posted so that those who remain on Facebook can still see it. But many, familiar with competitor Myspace’s fairly instant and, in effect, permanent deletion of information once a user exits the service, have long questioned Facebook’s alternative, revocable ’deactivation’ whereby content is preserved. Nobody, it seems, is able to ‘clear their desk’ when they leave Facebook.

The desire to keep users data forever is in line with some governmental security policies such as Gordon Brown’s intention in the UK to store all communications records including emails, website visits, voicemail and texts, but only Facebook has quite the nerve to write in perpetual commercial sublicensing and the right at any time in the future to incorporate user-content within derivative works. All very reminiscent of ‘record company’ practices that are now notorious but unlike a record or publishing contract, no reciprocal benefit whatsoever is offered to users who are on or who have departed Facebook’s service.

Another example where a corporate (in this case privately-owned) is setting the pace on controversial moves previously more associated with repressive regimes. Indeed some have been moved to talk of ‘Fascism’ in respect of the new Facebook ToS which is altogether moving into new realms of dissent around  a ‘Social Networking’ provider.

Facebook, it seems, doesn’t want to own your life but it does reserve the right to use it and sell it forever. Will your family pictures end up as commercial property? Will your identity, your quirks, your turns of phrase be repurposed in future entertainments as virtual characters? The possibilities are endless and despite founder Mark Zuckerberg’s assurances to the contrary, looking from a legal standpoint like a ‘coup de monde’ in terms of capturing content for free and unlimited future use.

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