Thursday, January 17, 2013

Facebook Postings Can Be Used As Evidence in a Court of Law According to U.S. Federal District Court Judge

A violation of intellectual viz. privacy rights by social networking commercial interests is of course not the same as the status of Facebook postings as a matter of evidence in a court of law.

Doug Mataconis writes at Outside the Beltway in bill-of-rights at Judge Rules That What You Post On Facebook Can Be Used As Evidence Against You that:
"... what you post on Facebook, or Twitter, or any other social networking site is considered publicly disseminated for the purposes of the law even if you have restricted access to your account to only a select group of people."
We are of the opinion that this does not put private postings and photographs in the category of "publicly disseminated" for commercial use by social media companies or anyone else, since otherwise anything then posted online would consequently be unprotected as if it were in the public domain, which is not the case. Copyrighted material is protected from infringement and that covers just about everything personal. It is NOT free for companies "to take" to make money.