Article by George Norman

On 19 May 2009

Are you worried about what might happen to the content you load to the popular social networking site Facebook? With the site’s new terms of service, which state that Facebook can pretty much do anything its wants with your content, you should be. But with the recently released Creative Commons License Facebook application, you can put some of your worries to rest.

Outreach Manager with Creative Commons, Fred Benenson, comments: “The premise is simple: installing the application allows Facebook users choose and place a CC license badge on their profile page indicating which license they want their content to be available under. Alongside the badge is text that explains what content (Photos, Videos and Status & Profile text are currently available as options) is licensed. This surrounding text also contains RDFa, though this is of limited utility to search engines since Facebook profiles are not yet publicly indexed.”


If you would like to spread the word and let your Facebook contacts in on the Creative Commons License Facebook application, then you should know that the app comes with the option to automatically update your status. This way news of your license choice will make it to your contacts’ feed.

While you are very much encouraged to use the app and spread the word, Fred Benenson says that work on the Creative Commons License Facebook application is not complete and as such you should think of it as being in Beta testing phase. Fred Benenson again: “Perhaps the largest limitation is that works can only be licensed on a per-profile basis. This means that you must make the decision to license all of your work of a given media type (e.g., all of your photos) under a particular CC license or none at all. Unless Facebook integrates CC license choices into their Photo application, licensing works on a per-photo basis (as users have the freedom to do on sites like Flickr and Wikimedia Commons) is not possible. Thus, this implementation of a CC licenses on Facebook is a stop-gap solution to true integration into the service.”

If you would like to get started with the Creative Commons License Facebook application, just click here.



Tags: Facebook, Creative Commons app

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