An article at The Register correctly points to a problematic part in Orkut‘s privacy policy:

„By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials.“

While I was aware of that when joining it is understandable that this is one of the more specific reasons for a couple of my friends not to join that network (apart from more general reasons that also apply not to provide any private details to databases at all – especially if they are located in the US of A). As I consider my participation experimental and do not belong to the strong paranoia camp that much, I joined nevertheless to play with semantic webs.

But it is important to stress that all dating services and social network systems are going to present a license of this kind or the other. I am not too much into legal issues to say what could or should be done in a different way. But at least Orkut could be much more open on this issue and explain more the motivation behind its moves.

On the other hand, if there wasn‘t such a license, Orkut could be a target for every lawyer trying to shut down the service for any legal issue. Complicated issue nevertheless. So I sold my picture to them already. As it is really public anyway, I don‘t care. But people who might care should have a second thought on what they do publish within that site and what not.