I remember a while back when I first signed up for facebook, I took a look at their terms of service for content posted onto the site, and was very surprised to read the following draconian clause:
"By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically
grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to 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."
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that once you post a photo or any other content on the site, Facebook essentially earns a perpetual license to do whatever they like with it. Granted that almost all photos are not valuable in any commercial sense, I still prefer to keep rights to my images and not just hand them out to anyone. After all, Flickr is free and they don't claim to hold any rights to your photos posted on it.
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