Craigslist Alters Its Licensing
August 7, 2012
There is a new twist in free classified ads, and this one may cause a few posters’ to pull a muscle. Baligu’s article “Craigslist Now Asks for Exclusive License When Posting” advises us to take a look at the small print when posting on Craigslist in the future.
The popular post up anything site has changed the way users submit content and it looks like they took lessons from some unlikely sources.
In order to complete the process one clicks on the ‘continue’, but now that simple gesture confirms that craigslist is the exclusive licensee of your content. You have officially given them the exclusive right to enforce copyrights against anyone copying, republishing, distributing or preparing derivative works without Craigslist’s consent.
Sound familiar? For comparison, here is Yelp, Facebook and Google’s language, in that order:
“As such, you hereby irrevocably grant us world-wide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sub licensable, transferable rights to use Your Content for any purpose.”
“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.”
“When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.”
See the similarities? Once you click that button, your content is no longer ‘your’ content. One could almost say the sites we utilize, actually utilize us more. Ya gotta love that community spirit of the internet. For some reason…I am not cheering.
Jennifer Shockley, August 7, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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