Defend Yourself Against Facebook’s Terms of Service

I think Facebook is an outstanding contact management tool, however I have a huge problem with the rights they claim in their Terms of Service.

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

This means Facebook can do whatever they want with any photo, video or I’m guessing blog post you upload to their server.  They don’t need to tell you, credit you or compensate you.  You surrender these rights when agree to the terms of using Facebook.

Before you dismiss your little old photos as worthless, let me give you an example of one case I witnessed.  One day last year I saw a photo of Paul from Caffination beside an ad for a router company.  It said something on the lines that Paul suggests you would like this product.  I contacted Paul.  He was unaware his photo was being used in an advertisement and he received no compensation.

What if you want to use Facebook to tell your friends about something you created?  There are two ways that I have found that protect your intellectual property rights.

Method 1: Post a link to whatever you created.  This will direct traffic to your site or one of your choosing.

The problem with Method 1 is anything with a link is filtered from Status Updates.  Those links are only visible on the News Feed.  There your link will get buried with all the quizzes and friend announcements and it doesn’t show up as your current status.

Method 2: Create a Fan Page for your website.  I have one for Coffee Hero and INeedCoffee.  Whenever new content is posted to either site, I add a link just like in Method 1.  Now this status update will only show up on the Pages section.  This has the benefit of reaching out to Fans outside your Friends, but the disadvantage of not showing up on your Status Update.

Now for the glue to connect the two.  After posting a link to new content on your Fan Page, go to your personal page and create a new status referencing the Fan Page using the “@” symbol.  Adding the @ symbol will build a link directly to your Fan Page.  This update, unlike posting a link, will show up in the Status Update feed.

Add link to blog post on Fan Page.

Go to personal page and reference the Fan Page using the @ symbol.

Your Fan Page will become a link inside your status update.

In the example above, all photos are hosted on Flickr and protected by a Creative Commons license that I set.  Those photos are embedded onto a blog post on my website of CoffeeHero.com.  A link to that blog post is added to the Fan Page for Coffee Hero.  Then I update my personal status and reference @Coffee Hero.   Not a single photo, video or blog was uploaded to the Facebook server, yet I was able to alert Facebook Friends and Fans about the latte design photos.

I don’t do this for every post.  Maybe 2-3 times a month.  Moving your content updates to a fan page a polite way of not inundating your friends with announcements when they are already aware of your website.

I understand Facebook needs to pay the bills, but they won’t be doing it using my unpaid labor.