Does Facebook Own Rights to My Photos?
Q: Sharing Artwork & Photos on Facebook
I've got a friend who constantly chastises me about putting my work up on Facebook, taunting me that Mark Zuckerberg now "owns" my work. I've read people argue both for and against this being true and I still can't decide what the truth is... I do realize that facebook reserves some sort of right to use photos of us in their ads, but is there anything in the regulations that says they would be able to use or reproduce our artwork in any way?
A: It's all about protecting different entities
It's a tricky question, but only because of the technicalities. You see, the issue is one of legality and the implications that can occur in a digital world, on a platform like facebook.
You see, social software means people are sharing and viewing things between one another. If Facebook didn't stipulate something like this, then they become vulnerable to lawsuit whenever the users of Facebook share stuff between profiles.
Suddenly, instead of your artwork only being on your profile, maybe it is showing up on someone else's too. Or, as I do with AAA, on that page/site. If you felt you were being taken advantage of, and that others were benefiting instead of you, you could make quite the issue of it.
I'm certain that Facebook has encountered many issues due to user behavior, and that as a course of protective measure they have some aspects of their terms and conditions clearly identified so they're less vulnerable to the whims of human behavior.
As well, they make it clear that they'll be copying your information in order to have the system work the way it is meant to work. With a network as vast as Facebook, it requires a lot of effort and server power around the globe to keep it up and running. Data storage and bandwidth costs each month are astronomical.
Facebook prides itself on never having any down-time. It's always on. To be efficient, and ensure the user-base is best served, they use many server farms in different parts of the globe. They will also have redundancy servers ready to go, backups made regularly, and so forth. This means there are many instances of what you share on different servers in different parts of the globe.
Were you to shut your profile down tomorrow, it would actually take longer than 12 hours for this information to be made completely unaccessible to others, depending upon where they are in the world, and the order in which the background processing takes care of deleting public server data on all these different servers around the globe.
I don't know how much of this makes sense to you, but I think it is important to just recognize that businesses have been vulnerable to the whims of idiots in the past, and their legal departments take every angle into consideration to ensure that people can't take something out of context and use it against them. The system is what it is, and it is there for people to enjoy and use. Some will respect the space, some will abuse it.