"For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it."

As I'm not a lawyer, let me pose this in the form of a question: can it be that any photos/videos or other creative-content you post on Facebook immediately cease to become your intellectual property, and are now owned by Facebook? And I sent the above paragraph (extracted from context-- is in its entirety) to a source whose specialty is intellectual property law for an informal interpretation.

"I don't believe Facebook provides users with an option to directly deny [Facebook] the right to use your content," said the source, "but you can configure your privacy settings to forbid others from re-distributing your content, which would seem to mean that if you have set your account to block others from sharing, then you later choose to completely delete your content from Facebook, you effectively block Facebook from future use of that content."

"But, bottom line," concluded the source, "it's a broad grant of rights and one that most people will never be able to retract in any meaningful fashion."Especially as genuinely deleting a Facebook account isn't a simple task. begins: "If you deactivate your account..." (italics mine). In the world of Facebook, deactivation of an account is different from "if you'd like your account permanently deleted with no option for recovery" (bold-text theirs). So different that when the ) posted one for Facebook, the site was slapped with a cease-and-desist letter from FB. You can still run their delete-scripts for Twitter, LinkedIn and the moribund MySpace.

I've focused on Facebook mainly because I increasingly see SMEs and other organizations slapping up a Facebook URL instead of taking ownership of their online presence. Perhaps online behemoths like Google are similarly avaricious in the IP realm, but Google's region-specific Terms and Conditions reads, in part: "Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours."