LinkedIn announced that it is making some changes to its Terms of Service on October 23rd. The company has rewritten its user agreement to make it easier to read and understand, and to better explain rights surrounding content.

In short, you own your content.

LinkedIn lists the following as the highlights of what’s changing:

• You own your content that you post on our services. You always have, and that hasn’t changed.
• If you delete anything from our services, our rights to it will end. But we obviously can’t control what others do with content you shared before you delete it. For example, before you delete a presentation, one of your connections may have cut and pasted it to a blog post they’ve authored.
• We don’t have exclusive rights to your content. It’s yours, so you’re free to repost your content on other services on the terms of your choice – like one of the Creative Commons licenses.
• We don’t license or sell your content to third-parties (like advertisers, publishers, and websites) to show to anyone else without your express permission.
• We won’t alter the intent of your content. But we may need to translate it, adjust the formatting, and make other technical changes to show it properly on our services.

The company says it has cut the length of its ToS in half. You can see the updated user agreement here and privacy policy here.

Image via LinkedIn (Flickr)