"Differentiate between personal information and material you put up on site"

When you join a social networking site such as Facebook or Orkut, you will first fill in personal details. Then you list favourite movies, wondering whether your friends knew that you cried watching Sholay. After admitting that you cannot live without masala omelette, you muse on your favourite authors.

Before you started with all the fun, however, you accepted the ‘Terms of Service’ or ‘Terms of Use’ of the site. As you go and post your first comment on a friend’s profile, you should know that even if you did not bother to read the small print the ‘Terms of Service’ is a legally binding contract you agreed to, listing your rights, responsibilities and the rules of service.

Recently, there was an uproar when Facebook made changes that were interpreted as allowing it to hold rights over your content even after you deleted your account. The online community erupted, creating groups to denounce the changes, with users demanding rights over their own content. Eventually, Facebook reverted to the original wording in the Terms of Service.

This debate raises a question – who owns the data on social networking sites?

It is useful to differentiate between personal information and the material you put up on the site, says Rahul Cherian, a specialist in copyright law and partner in IndoJuris Law Offices. Personal information would include data such as name, email ids, contact details and phone numbers. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, the site cannot disseminate personal information.

The Facebook controversy was not so much about personal information as about comments posted on a friend's profile. When you delete your account, should those comments disappear?

It all boils down to what is written in the terms of service, says Mr. Cherian. "You cannot breach the terms and conditions unilaterally."

When Facebook tried to change the terms to imply that your comments on someone else's profile would still remain after you deleted your account, many revolted. "Users found this transfer of copyright to the site excessive and disproportionate to the purpose," says Aarthi S. Anand, corporate attorney and IT law specialist. “Strictly under copyright, it is questionable whether ‘scraps’ or ‘wall postings,’ often brief messages or quick comments, would really be considered ‘writing’ deserving the full police protection of copyright.”

She adds: "In fact, as a copyright attorney, I am not sure we want to introduce notions of copyright into scraps even while I value copyright for a commercial or award-winning photograph. The latter usually pays to get legal advice and is likely to put up only samples for marketing purposes and will not allow free downloading."

When it comes to photos, it would pay to read the fine print if you wish to use your photos commercially, though you do not usually transfer copyright to the site. "And the specific term I would look for is any language that suggests that the networking site has the right to commercially exploit the work or create derivative works without your permission."

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