The friend you sent this message to could have ownership of this piece of information - if Facebook wanted to structure it this way. That is actually how email works.
This is untrue. An email written by you is your copyrighted work, from the moment you type it. Just because it's in my inbox doesn't mean you've relinquished your copyright. Technically, if I republish your email to me, you can sue me. [1]
The other day someone was polite enough to ask for permission to republish one of my comments here on HN on their blog. That surprised me for a second, but it shouldn't have. They were doing the correct, legal thing -- my comment was (and is) copyrighted by me; unless they were reproducing it for a fair use -- as I just did, when I quoted your post for the purpose of commenting on it -- they needed my permission to reuse it.
Now imagine how useful Facebook would be if every user had to seek a copyright release from every other user anytime they forwarded a message, or cropped a fellow user's photo, or reposted something, lest Facebook later be sued for contributory or vicarious infringement. [2] That's why Facebook has now decided to just have users agree to a waiver in advance.
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[1] Not that you would necessarily win such a lawsuit. There are such things as "implied licenses": If you send email to a public mailing list there's an implication that you mean for it to be public:
There are also many fair uses. But, especially if I use your writing for some sort of commercial purpose -- as Facebook does, constantly -- you can take me to court and hassle me, because the copyright is still yours. As the Creative Commons website will tell you at great length, under current US copyright law it's actually really hard to throw away the inherent copyright that you hold in your own work, even if you want to throw it away.
"Technically, if I republish your email to me, you can sue me."
There are also long established exceptions to this. Many writers have got around this by publishing users emails in book simply by putting a clause stating something like 'by sending me an email you are agreeing that I have all legal rights to the work'. As long as you make it explicit then you can own someones email, however there's no explicit notices anywhere on FB that they have a right to any information you give.
So when I click reply to an email, and preserves your entire text at the bottom of my reply, I'm guilty of copyright infringement? How about when I forward the school newsletter to the person the school meant to send it to?
Not infringement -- I'm pretty sure that both these use cases fall under the "implied license" case mentioned in the link I provided, above. And it's important to note that there's a big difference between using someone else's copyrighted material and copyright infringement. Don't be fooled by (e.g.) the music industry's attempt to confuse these two concepts.
There's also a difference between copyright infringement and an infringing act for which you will be prosecuted, convicted, and fined. There is necessarily a lot of leeway in copyright law, precisely because everything written today now falls under someone's nigh-permanent copyright.
(It used to be that, in the USA, you had to affix a copyright notice to a work to secure the copyright. That changed in 1989 when the US ratified the Berne Convention. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyrights)
I post an album of a friends drunken birthday party. I tag my friends. They start tagging their friends and commenting. Once people are interacting through my photos on facebook, the question comes down to who owns the interaction?
Since we have "weak" laws for dealing with this, or our existing laws just do not seem practical in the scope that Facebook transmits information globally, its probably the simplest means of getting around the legal framework: Assign ownership to the corporation, since you cannot fairly create a legal representative for each "network".
This is untrue. An email written by you is your copyrighted work, from the moment you type it. Just because it's in my inbox doesn't mean you've relinquished your copyright. Technically, if I republish your email to me, you can sue me. [1]
The other day someone was polite enough to ask for permission to republish one of my comments here on HN on their blog. That surprised me for a second, but it shouldn't have. They were doing the correct, legal thing -- my comment was (and is) copyrighted by me; unless they were reproducing it for a fair use -- as I just did, when I quoted your post for the purpose of commenting on it -- they needed my permission to reuse it.
Now imagine how useful Facebook would be if every user had to seek a copyright release from every other user anytime they forwarded a message, or cropped a fellow user's photo, or reposted something, lest Facebook later be sued for contributory or vicarious infringement. [2] That's why Facebook has now decided to just have users agree to a waiver in advance.
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[1] Not that you would necessarily win such a lawsuit. There are such things as "implied licenses": If you send email to a public mailing list there's an implication that you mean for it to be public:
http://www.piercelaw.edu/thomasfield/ipbasics/copyright-on-t...
There are also many fair uses. But, especially if I use your writing for some sort of commercial purpose -- as Facebook does, constantly -- you can take me to court and hassle me, because the copyright is still yours. As the Creative Commons website will tell you at great length, under current US copyright law it's actually really hard to throw away the inherent copyright that you hold in your own work, even if you want to throw it away.
[2] http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise14.html