I just wanted to give folks a quick update on yesterday’s post regarding Facebooks Terms of Use policy.

Several people had asked if this issue could be bypassed by including an RSS feed from your images hosted on Flickr.com or by using one Facebooks API software hacks to link to an external photo gallery on flickr, picassa or other online photo galleries?

While both of these solutions are easy to do, neither of them provide you protection from Facebook using your images for whatever they deem appropriate.

I posed this very question to legal expert Caroline E. Wright www.photoattorney.com and she responded with the following.

However, you’re still “posting” content on the site, which is included in the Facebook license – “By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant . . . to the Company.”

So in a nutshell until Facebook changes their Terms of Use, you are in no way protected from them using your content.

It was also brought to my attention there has been a Facebook group started which now stands at over 42k people protesting this very practice. Please join and hopefully together we can get Facebook to change the way they are doing business.

Ok I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not always the most diligent about reading those long Terms of Service Agreements that pop up when you sign up for a website. I mean it’s a lot of legalese and who’s got time for all that, gulp!

After spending the last few days posting some of my photography to my Facebook account for everyone to enjoy, it was brought to my attention that I might want to take a look at the Terms of Use agreement for the site as it sates the following:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically 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, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, 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.

This immediately sent up a red flag in my head, so i thought it best to run this by ProPhotoResource.com Legal Expert Carolyn E. Wright to get further clarification on the matter. Carolyn has since posted an answer to this issue on her blog www.photoattorney.com (I highly recommend you bookmarking Carolyns site).

It is true, but putting any of your work up on Facebook you are giving them carte blanche to use your photos, artwork or writings for anything they want including, advertising, promotion etc…

So the next time you sign up for a website and are about to upload your prize winning photos to it, please be very careful and make darn certain to read the terms of use beforehand.