With the web increasingly dominated by four major, and many minor, fiefdoms the cost of being part of those groups is gradually becoming clear.
As part of Facebook filings in advance of their public float they published the key agreements with their developer partners including that with games provider Zygna, technology journalist Tom Foremski has a disturbing look at Facebook’s conditions that illustrate the costs and risks.
In terms of the costs, Tom identifies Clause 2.1 of Facebook’s “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities” – shown as Annex 1 in the Developers as probably the biggest price for all content creators;
… 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 (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
So by sharing something on Facebook, you grant Facebook the right to do what they like with what you’ve created. That’s something worth thinking about.
For anybody trying to make a living off Facebook, it’s important to consider they also retain the right to throw you off the service at any time. From clause 4.10 of the Statement Of Rights Annex;
If you select a username for your account we reserve the right to remove or reclaim it if we believe appropriate (such as when a trademark owner complains about a username that does not closely relate to a user’s actual name).
So get into a trademark dispute with a big corporation – and often their lawyers cast a very wide net on potential similar spellings – and your account is shut down.
There’s also the specifics of the Zynga agreement that should concern anyone investing in the games company. Right at the beginning of the agreement we see this clause;
The parties further acknowledge that Zynga is making a significant commitment to the Facebook Platform (i.e., using Facebook as the exclusive Social Platform on the Zynga Properties and granting FB certain title exclusivities to Zynga games on the Facebook Platform). In exchange for such commitment, [*] the parties have committed to set certain growth targets for monthly unique users of Covered Zynga Games.
So Zynga is closely tied into the fortunes of Facebook, we knew that on a business level but now we know just how deep and binding the agreements are.
We should be clear, all the major social media and online services have similar clauses on intellectual property and copyright infringements; there’s no shortage of businesses who’ve been caught out by eBay or Paypal and plenty of people found their Google accounts shut down by their obsession with real names.
For all businesses the message is clear – be careful before committing totally to one online platform or another. Should you end up in a dispute, or find you’ve backed the wrong service, it may be a very costly process to get your company off that platform.
