If you've never worked with lawyers on crafting a new TOS for a new kind of service, it can be easy to misconstrue the legal jargon to imply evil intentions. But likely it's just that they've identified where they need to be clear about what they can and can't do with the information you upload and share.
I haven't read the TOS thoroughly, and IANAL, but what Zuck says sounds perfectly reasonable as far as I can tell. They identified a particular nuance of their service (i.e. the fact that once you share something with people, they need to be able to display it for ever to whom you've shared it with) and need realised they need to cover themselves legally against it.
It strikes me as proactive and sensible arse covering in what is a hyper-litigious society.
If you've a problem with the TOS I believe it to be a problem with the unfortunate legal wrangling, that large companies face to protect themselves, not with some evil intention of FaceBook.
I'm not trying to impute evil motives to Facebook and I understand why they're doing this. I'm just pointing out that blog posts about philosophies are trumped by contracts and it's ridiculous for Zuckerberg to expect anyone to take his words seriously.
I take his words seriously: that their philosophy is to preserve contributor ownership.
But Zuck may not always be in charge (isn't completely now, for that matter). So his words ought not to be taken legally: i.e., they offer no protection to Facebookers from corporate decisions.
Exactly. Even if their current intent is good, they are stating something that can potentially be evil for their customers, and only that counts for lawyers.
The argument is: imagine they have financial difficulties and that Dogbert buys them to exploit our data...
once you share something with people, they need to be able to display it for ever to whom you've shared it with)
I am skeptical. Where I work, we're constantly dealing with these sorts of cases where current privacy settings don't quite match past sharing actions. If we can deal with these problems, so can Facebook.
I'm sure the lawyers wanted to have maximum rights solely to protect FB from insane lawsuits. It's not a nefarious plan to sell your drunken clubbing photos. But they failed to achieve balance here.
Where I work, we're constantly dealing with these sorts of cases
Is your user base the size of Facebook's?
There's a certain percentage of human beings who file insane lawsuits. The more users you have, the greater the odds that you will sample one of them. Become a large enough company, and you'll need an entire legal staff just to respond to each week's pile of new lawsuits.
I don't think Yahoo mail or any of the other big mail providers find it necessary to assert ownership rights over content...
I'm no lawyer, but my guess is that email has relatively well-established case law. Email is old tech, and it's substantially similar to paper mail, which is really old tech, older than US law itself.
Whereas there's not a lot of case law about, say, a Facebook app which allows you to superimpose LOLcat-style captions on your friends' photos. Or a Facebook app (which I've just thought up, but which may also already exist) that allows you to ask your friends to sing phrases into their computer's microphone, then helps you construct a techno dance tune out of those phrases. Or any of the hundreds of other Facebook apps that encourage you to use your friends' data in novel ways.
A philosophy is warm fuzzies, but the contract that is the TOS is what matters.