Who owns copyright to a facebook status update?

[AnswerMan]

Are Facebook status updates covered under copyright protection? Who owns the copyright, me or Facebook or no one? Can someone republish my status updates without my permission?

[Puppi Dangeroux]

The general rule of the internet: DON'T put anything up you aren't willing to see spread all around with no credit to you. If you post it, you should be comfortable with it belonging to everybody.

Legally:

Facebook owns the pictures, format, etc.

You own the actual text, however proving you're the first one to ever say/type it and therefore the actual copyright owner (so you can sue other people for using it) is going to be incredibly difficult-also, if you don't indicate you want it copyrighted then you don't have a case against anybody. It's very difficult to prove copyright unless you actually get it registered.

Technically, any time you make something it's copyright to you, however in general it's assumed if you don't make it obvious that it belongs to you it's hard to get anything legal done-particularly if they aren't making a profit off of it.

[bcnu]

The law in 160 countries is that the "author" of the work is the owner of the copyright. The author has the right to "license" others to use the works in various ways. For instance, I'm typing this Y!A and have agreed to license Yahoo to distribute it and to license others to make a personal copy of it. You should check the "legal" or "copyright" section on Facebook as it would be VERY unlikely that they would want to own the copyright of anything a user/member/subscriber sent them. All they have is a license. When you want to enforce your copyright in US federal court, you have to file for a registration in the US Copyright Office to prove that you're the owner. It's not hard or expensive. If you register within 3 months of your publication (posting status update), in theory you can sue "copyright infringers" for up to $150,000 for each of your works that they violate.

This has the nice side-effect of encouraging lawyers to help you sue, as the saying goes, "Where there's money, there's lawyers."