Intellectual Property Blog

This post is an update to our August 27th post where we reported that a District Court in California held that privacy settings on Facebook and MySpace do actually matter.

On May 26^th, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ruled that, under the Stored Communications Act of 1986, postings to a user’s Facebook “wall” (and, similarly, to the “comments” page on MySpace – although nobody actually uses MySpace anymore) are considered private so long as the user has his privacy settings set such that only “friends” can see his wall postings.

I’ll give Facebook credit for one thing — they keep making you come back to their site, if for no other reason than to perform a little “preventative maintenance” on your profile from time to time.

Yesterday, Facebook took the first step toward their goal of Facebook-ing the entire planet by announcing that its familiar “like” button will start showing up all over the internet on non-Facebook sites.  I guess because it’s so much fun to tell people that you “like” their Facebook status, Facebook now wants you to have that opportunity wherever you’re surfing online.