This article in the New York Times caught my attention today:

Facebook’s Users Ask Who Owns Information

Apparently there has been a change in the fine print "Terms of Service" on the ubiquitous social networking site. The brouhaha started when the Consumerist blog posted a feisty entry challenging a recent unpublicized change to Facebook's "terms of use".The offending words:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content…

This language was not new, but a sentence at the end of the paragraph has been removed, which stated:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

from which Chris Walters at the Consumerist concluded:

Make sure you never upload anything you don't feel comfortable giving away forever, because it's Facebook's now.

Facebook has responded with assurances that Users Control Content.

The fuss conjures up worries that Facebook users will wind up like the fashion designer Halston, who lost the right to use his own name, having conveyed that right to Revlon.

This concern does seem to me a bit overblown. Facebook needs a license to use your content in order to work. Technically, someone is storing, copying, transmitting, and displaying your content every time you send an email. Facebook is all about you using Facebook to share information with others. As long as Facebook continues to respect the privacy options you selected, you should be OK.

Imagine that there is a state in the Union where the residents of a particular county are precluded from holding that state's highest office solely due to their residence.  It doesn't matter how well the scorned residents perform their civic duties — in fact, they could perform them perfectly — they will not be allowed to hold the highest office.  I imagine at least some of you would call such a practice un-American.

Well, when the Utah Utes college football team, which went 13-0 with victories over four Associated Press top-25 teams and was the champion of a conference that went 6-1 in the regular season against the Pac-10, is forced to watch one-loss teams Oklahoma and Florida play in the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) "National Championship" game tonight, they are basically being told:  "You are a citizen, but you cannot hold the highest office."

For those of you not familiar with how college football determines its national champion, here is a quick primer (this primer also discusses possible antitrust challenges to the current system, making this a perfectly legitimate business law post):

Under BCS rules, the nation's two top-ranked teams–as determined by human polls and computer rankings that take into account strength of schedule, margin of victory, and other factors–play each other in one of those bowls, with the winner named national champion. While teams such as Utah can theoretically qualify for the national championship game, for various reasons the odds are stacked against them. . . . [R]eporters who vote in the Associated Press poll can still award Utah the AP's national championship if they want.

I'm not the first one to say this is un-American (see here and here).  And to be precise, it is the BCS — and not the game of college football itself — that is arguably un-American (but that is not nearly as catchy of a headline).

But this is still Thursday, and the A.P. writers could vote contrary to what appears to be conventional wisdom and make the American dream a reality again for teams like Utah.  Or, even more impressively, the college football coaches who are obligated to cast their vote for the winner of the Oklahoma-Florida game could engage in a fully justified act of "civil disobedience" and send an even more powerful message.

We can certainly hope.  This is, after all, America.