Facebook CC Integration/BoRR
History: The movement to integrate Creative Commons licensing options into Facebook user profiles is growing out of Facebook user response to the February 4th, 2009 revision of Facebook's Terms of Use. The only notice to of this change was posted to the Facebook Blog February 4th, 2009 and was not widely read by Facebook users. Several days later, when, through media reports, users discovered this change and responded in protest, Facebook principals reverted to the prior Terms of Use dated September 23rd, 2008 and opened the group titled 'Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities' (BoRR), resulting in a user request that Facebook integrate creative commons and other licensing options. The group 'Why not include Creative Commons in Facebook TOS?' (cconfb) was formed in order to focus this movement effectively. The need to produce a collaborative proposal on a Facebook/CC integration to present to the BoRR group that will provide users with choice about how their Facebook content is shared arose. This wiki document is the result.
Objectives: To create a collaborative proposal to the BoRR group submitting the advantages to both facebook and facebook users of integrating more versatile licensing options to user profiles and uploaded content, including Creative Commons licensing, similar to the way this has been successfully modeled by Flickr. View mockups of what this Facebook CC Integration might look like.
The Problem: Quote problematic sections from current Facebook TOS (revised September 23, 2008)
Proposed Solutions: Describe how these issues will be improved/resolved by adopting more versatile licensing options as described above.
Benefits to Proposed Solutions:
Basic info from the Facebook group 'Why not include Creative Commons in Facebook TOS?'
Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved."
Currently, when you upload your content (whether it is photos, videos, or your band's music) to Facebook you must grant the company a license to use your work inside the social network. This is similar what happens when you upload a video to YouTube: you grant them a license to show your videos on the site. But what is unclear on Facebook is what, exactly, your friends and the rest of the world can do with your work. Some people don't want anyone using or sharing their work. That's OK. But Creative Commons is designed to help everyone else tell the world how they want their work to be shared and reused.
If Facebook adopted Creative Commons licenses, you could tell the world that you're OK with your photos being used for non-commercial purposes, but that users must give you attribution. You could even say that commercial purposes of your content are alright. It's all up to you, because you own the copyright to your work, not Facebook. This is why CC offers 6 different licenses that span the middle ground between "All Rights Reserved" and the "Public Domain." Our licenses range from Attribution only to Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives. To learn about all of our licenses, visit this page:
http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses
Many sites such as Flickr and Wikipedia support Creative Commons licenses as tools to empower users, and there are now over 140 million CC licensed works already published on the web. Isn't it time for Facebook join the club and let users share their work?
To watch some videos that explain CC further, visit this page:
http://support.creativecommons.org/videos/
As Mark Zuckerberg said February 18th: "If you'd like to get involved in crafting our new terms, you can start posting your questions, comments and requests in the group we've created—Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. I'm looking forward to reading your input." ref: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54746167130
But the group 'Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities' is full of several other things, so in this group we focus to get CC in Facebook's TOS similar to Flickr's or You Tube's TOS.
