You may or may not have heard of Fark.com. It is a news aggregator website similar to Metafilter, Reddit and others. It has attracted a large number of followers who submit interesting news articles with witty headlines. An article posted on Fark can attract a hundred comments or more.
But there is a problem...
If you submit to Fark.com, Fark will take ALL of your copyright. That applies to headlines, comments, Photoshop montages, photographs and audio edits. In other words everything. Here is their copyright notice...
Copyright Notice
Fark.com is the legal owner of all copyright interests of Fark.com content. Each and every submission to Fark.com carries with it an implied assignment of the entire copyright interest in the submission. In exchange for the content and publication of that submission on Fark.com, Fark.com grants back to the submitter a non-exclusive, non-transferable and royalty-free license to republish that submission in any and all forms.
Fark can sell your work, re-publish your work wherever and whenever they please, license it to others, repurpose it, sell the film/TV rights - anything they like for as much money as they can get.
YOU GET NOTHING!
Notice that you can't even transfer the license they gave you back. Basically you've been shafted. Totally.
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2 comments:
Technically they have to have (something like...) this, otherwise they are reproducing your work without the right to do so, and you could sue them. Now, could it be written in friendlier language? Boilerplates like this were very common early on with websites that reproduced uploaded content, I guess its what happens when you get lawyers involved who are more versed in traditional publishing and content.
Certainly they have to have something, but to give copyright OWNERSHIP to them is outrageous - what they should ask for is unlimited license to use the material on their site.
What they are stating is that if you upload your original piece (might be words, artwork, music, or video) they own it and license it back to you. I certainly don't think that the majority of people who upload to sites expect that to happen.
I guess it pays to read the smallprint!!
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