Legal Research

Faced with the ire of thousands of users who objected to the social networking site's new policy on ownership of user-posted content, Facebook has done an about-face.  They have dropped the changes they made to their terms of use, and are no longer claiming any ownership rights in users' content. 

Facebook has a history of making major changes without notice.  Long-time Facebook users may remember the much-despised advertising feature, Beacon, which notified your Facebook friends every time you made an online purchase.  Let your imaginations inform you just how undesirable that could be. 

The Facebook controversy underscores again just how much of our lives we have moved online.  The Obama campaign illustrated that we could move our elections online.  And while protests used to mean taking to the streets, now we man the keyboard, with the smell of warm electronics, rather than tear gas, in our nostrils.  Safer, but somehow not as thrilling.  See this article on NPR.