Recall earlier that I analogized your rights under copyright law to a bundle of sticks, with each stick representing a right that you could give away, even while retaining others. When you upload your copyrighted work (and remember that you always own the copyright, even if you don’t register it with the government) to a third-party platform, you give them a license to use your work in some fashion. For example, on YouTube, when you upload a video, you are giving them the perpetual right to perform (meaning, play the video) that work on their platform.
When you upload a photo to Facebook, the Facebook terms of service state that “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.”
Did you get all that? You can delete the content, and revoke the license, but if other people have “shared” your content on Facebook, then Facebook still owns the license for the content. So if you don’t want to grant a license that you can’t control, you’d better change your privacy settings so that your content cannot be shared. If you make your content “public” on Facebook, then you are arguably granting Facebook the ability to “sub-license” the content to others.
What happens if people who saw your content on Facebook post a link to it on other social media platforms, is that copyright infringement? Maybe. There have been numerous court fights over whether hyperlinking is a copyright violation, and this is but one of the very nuanced issues in copyright law. All good reasons to seek advice from a competent attorney if you have doubts about what you can or can’t do.
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