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Busy marketing day yesterday. I reached out to a few new-to-me publications, sent out some LOIs, and followed up with some queries from a month ago. Nothing solid yet, but it’s foundation-building time. I finished client blog work and today I have to get some invoices out.
I was alerted to a clause in the LinkedIn user agreement that’s a bit disturbing:
“You own the information you provide LinkedIn under this Agreement, and may request its deletion at any time, unless you have shared information or content with others and they have not deleted it, or it was copied or stored by other users. Additionally, you grant LinkedIn a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual, unlimited, assignable, sublicenseable, fully paid up and royalty-free right to us to copy, prepare derivative works of, improve, distribute, publish, remove, retain, add, process, analyze, use and commercialize, in any way now known or in the future discovered, any information you provide, directly or indirectly to LinkedIn, including, but not limited to, any user generated content, ideas, concepts, techniques or data to the services, you submit to LinkedIn, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties. Any information you submit to us is at your own risk of loss as noted in Sections 2 and 3 of this Agreement.”
Not exactly the most innocuous representation of copyright infringement. But is it infringement? Or is it a clause that allows LinkedIn to promote its site freely without worrying about who might sue if their forum post ends up in a teaser email for LinkedIn?
Here’s my take, and please feel free to disagree: you shouldn’t be posting your work on LinkedIn or any other free website. At all. If they want to circulate something, let them circulate your resume, your credentials, your expertise. If you use LinkedIn in the manner it was intended, I don’t see how the clause could be harmful to you. If you’re one who likes to post your poetry or essays all over the place, you could see stuff redistributed and you’re loathe to do a thing about it.
How do you see it? Is it disturbing to you as a writer or creative? Does it make you think twice about using LinkedIn? Where could it be detrimental to you?
Argghh-my loong comment got eaten by the gremlins. I'll try again.
I found this post from 2009 webtechlaw post. It essentially says the LI Agreement is worse than FB.
I wrote a post a while back on 7 things in the LI Agreement that you might not know. Much mellower than this, but surprising just the same.
I think it's another fine example of closing the barn door after the horse escaped. If the 2009 post is still accurate, even if you terminate, LI retains their "rights."
The Company Page and Published work are two areas that could be of concern. Of course, there's always concern about what's shared in Groups or Q&As. It amazes me what some people share.
I'm not sure how (or if) this will change the way I participate in LI. I do share my work from a promotional standpoint. What are the odds that they would use it in a manner I would have a problem with? I'm not sure.
Thanks for the thought-provoking post, Lori.
Cathy, thanks for the links. I do remember your post regarding LI.
I share my resume, my background, my skills, and my thoughts in forums on LI. I share links to articles, but since they're copyrighted elsewhere, good luck to LI facing a litany of magazine lawyers! LOL
I don't find it all that disturbing because I don't share unpublished work there. Maybe it's more of a lesson in what NOT to share rather than what rights are being stripped away.
Yes, it's disturbing on one level, but on another level, it doesn't really apply.
Dammit, Jim — I'm a doctor, not a lawyer!
I read this as "if you post any intellectual property of any type on this site, we're not responsible for how it gets used and BTW you can't sue anyway." I have no idea if it would stand up in court, but common sense would dictate that anyone posting valuable information in a public forum without understanding the implications…is a fool.
To put a finer point on it: If they assemble a book of "LinkedIn's 101 Most Unbelievably Fantastic Marketing Ideas" and your lovingly crafted post was one of them and it becomes a NYT bestseller: tough noogies. You're not going to see a dime. And, as with HuffPo bloggers, I'll feel nah pity for ye.
Yesterday was a big invoice day here. Mmmmmm…invoices.
Invoices….tasty! 🙂
That's how I would interpret it too, Jake – right down to the "is a fool" part.
BTW, LOVE the McCoy reference. 🙂
I've only posted one thing on LinkedIn (I shared it here as well, I believe)- an old essay I wrote about how little per-word article rates have gone up since the 1940s. (As Hugo Lydecker said in the film noir classic, Laura, "Sentiment comes easy at 50-cents a word.") That piece had already been published and is a bit outdated, despite the still stagnant per-word rates at most publications.
The clause you posted reads to me more like a kitchen sink / shotgun approach to covering their collective butt, just in case. After all, millions of comments are made on LinkedIn every day – finding one or two reprint-worthy items buried in those posts would be like finding a needle hidden in a 10K acre field of side-by-side haystacks. (The one way great posts might come to light is if hundreds of people "like" them.)
That said, it's always better safe than sorry. I've never understood why some people share their own poems and things in public forums.
Blogger's eating posts again. It's acting like you never feed it.
I agree.
That extends to posting drafts of fiction on your blog. First of all, posting work on your blog constitutes "first publication rights" to most publishers. You post part of your draft of a WIP on your blog, you've blown most chances at publication
Second — why would you put a DRAFT out in public? Yeah, share with trusted readers, but do you really want people to see your work in the nude, before it's been polished? Out there in its worst form for all eternity?
Reading a badly written draft is not going to entice me to buy the book if it ever is published.
Also, I get paid to read and comment on drafts, outside of my circle of Trusted Readers, where we do swaps. Why would I comment on someone's first draft on blog?
PS –once you're under contract and have a release date and have polished your work with an editor, definitely post excerpts for marketing purposes — that's fun.
But don't post drafts of WIPS!
Amen, Devon. Amen.
I had read a "sample" posted on a famous author's website once. I don't know if it was a pre-edited sample, but after that one chapter I swore off all her work. She's a BIG NAME AUTHOR, and I was stopped in my tracks by bad analogies that conjurred up wildly impossible images.