The license which you, as a Facebook user, grant to Facebook is very broad and it covers not just your content on Facebook but content you may have linked to from outside Facebook. What the terms don’t do is grant ownership but the license is so broad Facebook may as well own your content. What alarms me the most is that Facebook takes a license to the content you may only link to on Facebook and don’t upload to the service. This covers photos you may have stored on Flickr, videos on Zoopy or Vimeo and more. This virtual land grab makes these terms of use a particularly invasive set of permissions.

They used to have a clause that states that when you deleted your account (although with Facebook you can never, really, delete your account) then the licence is revoked. No more, they keep it forever.

One complication I see coming up is how brands are going to react to this. Facebook is used by many brands for both campaigns and for connections. It has to be one way that FB can gain revenue. I’d love to see what the lawyers of, say, an entertainment property or film say about the new terms.