On Twitter, Facebook and other sites that promote sharing of content, users can typically choose whether they want to post their updates publicly to everyone or carefully select their audience.
But even careful users may not be aware that sites where they post their status updates, photos, videos, fiction or digital art may be able to repurpose that content, using it for marketing or remixing it with other people’s submissions and republishing it.
In fact, the terms of service on many sites are so wordy and so legalistic that users may not understand — or even be aware of — the intellectual property rights that they cede when they check the “agree” box to set up an account, according to
a new study from researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Take Craigslist, where, the researchers reported, people who wanted to post were obliged to give the site license “to copy, perform, display, distribute, prepare derivative works from (including, without limitation, incorporating into other works) and otherwise use any content that you post.”
Or Asianfanfics, a small fan fiction site, whose terms of service provisions, the researchers wrote, allowed “for the site to essentially do whatever they like with whatever is posted there without any notice or attribution to the creator.”
