John Oliver Explains Why People Need To Quit Posting Those Crap Facebook Copyright Statements

Playing into the universal fear that the Skynet revolution starts with Facebook hoarding pictures of babies and updates about The Bachelorette, dodgy copyright notices have been doing the rounds for some time now. And, despite being routinely assessed as useless since 2012, their popularity with the dads and aunties of this world suggest they may never fully die.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, firstly: congratulations on being one of those people who decided to never get Facebook. Everyone is having so many parties without you, and I have no idea how you even found your way here. Secondly: it looks a little something like this.

Written and shared by people whose major legal qualification is watching the occasional episode of Law & Order, these statements crop up each time Facebook has some kind of minor change in their business or design and do absolutely zilch to change anything.

According to the site’s easily accessible terms of service, “you own all of the content and information you post on Facebook”, but there’s a fairly huge catch. “For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos … you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook.” This means that Facebook does have not only a right to use your content in a number of ways, but also transfer that right over to other organisations.

This is fairly common knowledge to most of the site’s users — we regularly make compromises such as this for the conveniences of such online services — but overnight, John Oliver spelled it out for the rest of the world.

“You might as well be posting [a] picture of sloth revealing a woman’s cleavage, because it would grant you literally the same legal rights.”

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Both the CEO and one of the main software engineers at Facebook endorse this message: