Questions On Social Content Ownership After Facebook Policy Changes

As the world becomes increasingly digitised, the question of who owns the uploaded pieces of people’s lives — their photographs, their missives to friends, their posted musings and blog entries — is clearly an issue capable of generating a lot of passion.

This was powerfully evidenced last week when popular social networking site Facebook changed its terms of service, removing a clause that automatically relinquished rights to all uploaded data when a user closed his or her account and causing an uproar over users’ rights and privacy.

The site quickly replaced the clause in response to the outcry, explaining that the company is still trying to find a way to satisfy contradictory user desires to control their posted content and also to use the site to share it.