Thursday, August 30, 2012

Facebook author app

A friend of mine passed on a rather dire warning about the Author Marketing App on Facebook, which many authors probably aren't aware of. As with so many of these things, it seems it pays to read the small print. More particularly, the bit of the small print which reads:

"You grant to Agile Marketing the unrestricted, unconditional, unlimited, worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual fully-paid and royalty-free right and license to host, use, copy, distribute, reproduce, disclose, sell, resell, sublicense, display, perform, transmit, publish, broadcast, modify, make derivative works from, retitle, reformat, translate, archive, store, cache or otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of your User Content to which you have contributed, for any purpose whatsoever, in any and all formats; on or through any and all media, software, formula or medium now known or hereafter known; and with any technology or devices now known or hereafter developed and to advertise, market and promote same."

In other words, you're signing away all rights to any content, including any excerpts or short stories you post, for all time, without any form of compensation.

Read it and weep. And more importantly, avoid this app like the proverbial plague unless you're happy with losing all control over any of your work that you add to it.

I knew there was a good reason I didn't like Facebook...

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