Two copyright statements are currently circulating which claim that, if posted on a Facebook user’s page, they will protect their intellectual property rights.
Both statements have existed for a number of years, but there has been a recent surge in the number of people posting them.
One claims that a notification must be posted in order to keep a user’s posts private, while another says that a fee will be charged to achieve the same result.
However, the notice is a hoax and does nothing to protect a Facebook user’s images or film footage clips – that is managed entirely by the site’s terms and conditions, which users agree to when they register an account and use it to post content.
In Facebook’s terms and conditions it clearly states: “For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: 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 (IP License).”
This essentially means that Facebook owns what a user posts on their account, and no copyright notice can stop that from being the case.
However, in a statement issued directly from the social media platform, it was confirmed that any user whose photos and status are set to private will remain private, and not in the public domain, for free.