If you’re a frequent users of Twitter, earlier this week you may have seen a couple of pictures of the shuttle launch doing the rounds from one Stefanie Gordon. She snapped the photos on her iPhone while on a Delta flight which just so happened to be passing by the Florida launch site. The pictures quickly went viral and have notched up around 650,000 views between them at the time of writing.
Stefanie was contacted by news media from across the globe, all asking for the rights to use the image. Stefanie said they were free to use them as they saw fit, as long as she was credited. While most obliged, the Associated Press and a few others even going so far as to pay her, some large outlets ran the pictures without a credit. Ms Gordon told Mashable –
“It angers me. You take the time, it’s your photo, it’s sitting on your phone … it’s frustrating to see your picture without your name on it.”
The reason for their lack of accreditation are the ominous Twitpic terms and conditions. We’ve covered them before, but this recent case has thrown into sharp relief exactly what rights you are giving up by uploading your photos to the service.
Essentially you still own the photographs, but you are surrendering all your other rights to them. Here is the paragraph in question from TwitPic’s terms –
“You retain all ownership rights to Content uploaded to Twitpic. However, by submitting Content to Twitpic, you hereby grant Twitpic a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service and Twitpic’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels.”
So the media outlets that bypassed Ms Gordon and published without accreditation were perfectly within their rights to do so, even though it was arguably not the gentlemanly thing to do.
So how can one avoid signing away all their content to Twitpic and its photo sharing brethren? The simple answer is to use a vanilla photo storage service such as Flickr or Picasa – the rights remain in your hands when uploading. Sure, it may lack the convenience of Twitpic, but @stefmara has already made close to $1,000 from her hastily-snapped iPhone photos, and isn’t a little inconvenience worth a stack of cold, hard cash?
