Intellectual Property Law

Facebook Imbroglio - That Was Fast

By Mike Madison

Before you could say “Facebook is . . . doing an about face,” Facebook did an about face on changes to its Terms of Service.

Bill McGeveran at Info/Law has the story and the relevant links, if this mini-maelstrom blew by you too quickly. (In our household, it blew across the screen at CNN yesterday morning and disappeared immediately into the ether.)

The one note that I might add to Bill’s comments is this:

My initial reaction to the news was that the ToS change may have had little to do Facebook planning to appropriate user content and get maverick-y with it against user wishes. Instead, I suspect that the change had something to do with the organization of Facebook’s technology infrastructure. So long as every electronic reproduction of a copyrightable work of authorship is a “reproduction” for purposes of copyright law, then every content serving and storage deal with a technology partner needs to account for releases and licenses of the content served and stored. It’s possible that the ToS change was Facebook’s way of indemnifying some unnamed third party technology companies that work with Facebook to keep the network running smoothly.

I don’t know whether that’s actually the case, and even if it is the case, it doesn’t excuse the bumbling way in which the news emerged and was (mis)handled by the company.

But that explanation, if true, highlights the mismatches (i) between user expectations in social networks; (ii) between default copyright norms and default privacy norms; and (iii) between copyright’s role in promoting innovation and creativity and its role in structuring commercial transactions and firms.

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Full post as published by Madisonian.net on February 18, 2009 (boomark / email).