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Woman Wins $10,000 For Reading Fine Print of Terms and Conditions of Travel Insurance Policy (npr.org)
Georgia high school teacher Donelan Andrews won a $10,000 reward after she closely read the terms and conditions that came with a travel insurance policy she purchased for a trip to England. Squaremouth, a Florida insurance company, had inserted language promising a reward to the first person who emailed the company. NPR reports: "We understand most customers don't actually read contracts or documentation when buying something, but we know the importance of doing so," the company said. "We created the top-secret Pays to Read campaign in an effort to highlight the importance of reading policy documentation from start to finish." Not every company is so generous. To demonstrate the importance of reading the fine print, many companies don't give; they take. The mischievous clauses tend to pop up from time to time, usually in cheeky England. The report continues to highlight a number of different cases where companies have intentionally inserted unusual clauses into their terms of service, knowing people wouldn't read them. Here's one such case: A few years earlier, several Londoners agreed (presumably inadvertently) to give away their oldest child in exchange for Wi-Fi access. Before they could get on the Internet, users had to check a box agreeing to "assign their first born child to us for the duration of eternity." According to the Guardian, six people signed up, but the company providing the Wi-Fi said the clause likely wouldn't be enforceable in a court of law. "It is contrary to public policy to sell children in return for free services," the company explained.
The problem is, that the T&C are *deliberately* written to hide as many pitfalls as physically possible, so that an any conceivable case, *you* are the one who is duped, and they always have a "get out of jail free" card for when they fuck up, so that they only have to point at the T&C, and go "But you knew and agreed to this impossible-to-interpret-that-way-until-you-are-told-and-then-convincingly-'obvious' term right there on page 24 referring to page 2 and 9 indirectly as stated on page 13, all in 6pt font!".
It's the brainchild of a sociopathic (actually aka psychopathic) mind that has only a single goal and no qualms of walking over dead bodies, if it gets away with it and there is a buck to be made.
Services like Facebook and printing services need to make copies of your photo to provide their service. As such, you have to grant them a limited license under copyright to make those copies. They have to "own" those copies to be able to process / compress / move / store the photos.
The thing you have to watch out for is services which try to slip in language granting themselves an unrestricted, unlimited license to reproduce and relicense your work. A new free photo hosting service came up recently, and when I read the terms and conditions it said exactly that. Granting them such a license would allow them to sell your photos without your permission nor giving you any royalties. Most services like Google Photos make clear they're not doing this, by including the phrase "for the purpose of operating this service" somewhere. That intentionally limits their right to make copies of your photo to only what's necessary to provide their service.
Yes you own the content. And you give Facebook a perpetual, transferable license to the content to use in any way they see fit.
So you still own the copyright, but they can use the photo any way they see fit and sell the picture to anyone to use, including commercially. Given that I'm not sure that it's that far off to say they own the photo. They own the rights to use it however they want.
They haven't done it yet, but mark my words, one of these days someones going to find their baby pictures in some advertising and try to sue and find out that facebook sold it and they gave Facebook the right to do this when they uploaded the photo to them.
Now costco and all the others the terms are written that you are giving them the rights to copy the photo around in their system and to make hard copies. You aren't giving them control, copyright or ownership, but that isn't true for Facebook. It's a perpetual, transferable license.
But that's the problem - they can't accurately summarize the legalese to the extent that it would hold up in court. If they could, we wouldn't have the legalese in the first place.
Plan language is generally used where it can be. The issue is that when lawyers start tearing at plain language, they tend to rip it apart. The only solution is to make it tough enough that they can't do that. Thus the legalese.
You could flail and attempt to translate, but that would probably need to come with it's own disclaimer that it's not legally binding, and that you should retain your own lawyer to make sure that the translation generally says what the legalese says. But you'd probably need to wrap that statement in enough legalese to cover your ass, and then it's just legalese all the way down.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor