Lawyers urge Facebook users to remain on guard

Facebook has admitted that the new terms were introduced without full consideration

Facebook has sparked a widespread debate about the importance of copyright clauses in social networking sites' terms of service, after an update on 4 February meant that it would no longer relinquish control over content when users ended their contracts with the firm.

After thousands of protests, Facebook announced on Wednesday that it would revert to the old conditions of service. But lawyers warned that Facebook's move should not be forgotten so quickly, particularly as the company intends to draw up new terms and conditions soon.

"I would be very worried if I was a Facebook user. Whatever they changed the conditions for, they grabbed more rights than they needed to," said Susan Hall, an ICT and media partner at law firm Cobbetts.

Facebook is now attempting to regain the trust of its users. Barry Schnitt, manager of corporate communications and public policy at the firm, admitted to a protest group called 'Facebook Owns You' that the new terms were introduced without full consideration.

"We realised that the new version of the terms might technically permit some of the hypothetical situations people have offered," he explained.

"I can assure you, however, that these hypotheticals are not ones we had in mind when writing the terms, and that selling user information for profit, or using it to advertise Facebook in some way, was never part of our original intent."

But Cobbetts' Hall insisted that a global organisation like Facebook, which has more than 150 million users, should have considered the implications of the new terms before their introduction, and that a key component when drawing up copyright legislation is considering the hypothetical.

People often post media content on a social networking site as a convenient way to share experiences, but they may not be aware of the value of the content at the time, she explained.

Hall came up with a few hypothetical situations of her own. "What if you were like the chap in Dallas in 1963 who took footage of the Kennedy assassination? He may not have realised it at the time, but what he captured was priceless," she said.

Other examples of valuable content on Facebook include postings during the tsunami, the July 2007 London bombings and Hurricane Katrina. Hall warned that social networkers should rethink what kind of data they upload to sites such as Facebook. "There is an interesting division between people's anxiety over their data, and the freedom with which they throw it into the public domain," she said.