kentdavidson - 9:24 pm on Feb 17, 2009 (gmt 0)

In short, there is no technical reason at all for the terms to be as strict as they are. But Facebook chooses to be "overly formal and protective of the rights we need," however, there is no legal reason to need the rights they are taking.

As well, while Facebook says they never claimed ownership [thestandard.com] what their terms, in fact, do is take away ownership from their users.

The largest Facebook group, "Users against Facebooks new TOS", is around 30,000 members right now (36 hours after creation), it's a paltry percentage of the 500 million members they claim to have. (That's like 0.006% of their user base. Whee.)

In short: Don't post anything, anywhere, unless you plan on losing ownership of it. I've removed my images and anything else which I want to maintain ownership of.

[edited by: eelixduppy at 2:49 am (utc) on Feb. 18, 2009]
[edit reason] no personal URLs, see TOS [/edit]