ownership

the recent change to the facebook terms of service caused a huge uproar among facebook users. the change involved the removal of a very important part of the terms, which said if you removed your account, facebook's license to it would expire. this made many people believe that facebook owned everything you ever posted, and this led to a huge amount of facebook groups protesting this change. a facebook representative then sent this message:

"We are not claiming and have never claimed ownership of material that users upload. The new Terms were clarified to be more consistent with the behavior of the site. That is, if you send a message to another user (or post to their wall, etc...), that content might not be removed by Facebook if you delete your account (but can be deleted by your friend). Furthermore, it is important to note that this license is made subject to the user's privacy settings. So any limitations that a user puts on display of the relevant content (e.g. To specific friends) are respected by Facebook. Also, the license only allows us to use the info "in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof." Users generally expect and understand this behavior as it has been a common practice for web services since the advent of webmail. For example, if you send a message to a friend on a webmail service, that service will not delete that message from your friend's inbox if you delete your account."

i guess this makes it a little clearer but it just reinforces the concept that anything you put on facebook is there to stay.

http://consumerist.com/5150175/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can-do-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever
http://consumerist.com/5154745/facebook-clarifies-terms-of-service-we-do-not-own-your-stuff-forever