Thread: Copyright of uploaded images

Does oneI keep copyright of her/his uploaded images to sites like:
Facebook
Minus
Flickr
500px
Picasa
DPR
etc

Generally speaking, you would be retaining copyright, but would be granting a free license to the site for use of your images. How broad of a license depends on the particular rules of the site.

I think facebook pretty much get to do whatever the youknowwhat they want to do with your images: 'you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License).'
Facebook

flickr gets a 'worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license(s) (...)to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Yahoo! Services solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available.'
Yahoo! Terms of Service
so that's not quite as agressive as facebook

Most sites don't give-a-rat's about your images, it's all about them, acting as a middleman, protecting themselves from the owner and/or end-user and protecting themselves as an end user.

Gary

I believe this is an old thread, however I came across this article today that I think addresses the issue regarding copyrighting uploaded images - The Age: Photographer sues over stolen photos.

I hope they lose their shirts...

Originally Posted by hikari

i hope they lose their shirts...

lol ...

Originally Posted by Herman

Does oneI keep copyright of her/his uploaded images to sites like:
Facebook
Minus
Flickr
500px
Picasa
DPR
etc

Typically photo sharing sites like Zenfolio, Smugmug and Flickr allow you to set copyright and limit what resolutions to display. That said, there is nothing that can stop someone from downloading your file or doing a screen capture. if I have an image that I really wanted to protect I wouldn't put it on any photo sharing sites.

You can right click protect images on SmugMug. It's not foolproof, but it offers some slight degree of protection if you want it. But anything online is prettty much vulnerable. I guess you have to decide how important sharing your stuff is. I think my friends like that I'm no longer sending them huge photo files but just links to SmugMug -- which they can click on or not.

My basic theory is: Don't put it online or in an email if you absolutely have to protect it and keep it private.

Everything you view ends up as files in your browsers cache. Even if you right click protect a page, someone can sift their cache to find the image. If your images are embedded in Flash then a program like Gordon on the mac [it's a Flash decompiler] can lift them.. or as was said a screen shot. I use to have a web page protector encryption program that would encrypt html/css as well as rename associated files making them more difficult to find in the cache but they were still there. The only thing really protected by that app was the html itself. Encryption btw made the pages slower to load.

I have been stolen from before, site layouts, graphics, photos.. The majority of what we post though isn't worthy of stealing. It's just the idea that when you get one great shot, like Noam Galai's "Stolen Scream" photo and it is stolen by people all over the world, printed on walls to tee shirts, posters and other items and not one cent goes to the original artist [and it's his face!] it's a bit disheartening you can't get royalties from all that and also a bit haunting to know that your work is all over being used to represent .. whatever.

When people start getting serious about their work, art of any kind from music to photos, they endounter the copyright conundrum. In the end Lawrence is right, if you don't want any possibility of your work being stolen then do not put it on the web and certainly not on sites like facebook that are frequently in the news for changing up their terms of service and yet again stripping their users of even more rights. I found this site a few days ago Terms of Service; Didn't Read which shows several social media and photo sites various terms. While it isn't in any way all inclusive yet as the project is relatively knew, you get a good at-a-glance look at what goes on from site to site.

When in doubt, read, when in more doubt, don't electronically publish. And you can seek whatever copyright protection is available in your country though I am not sure if those laws are applicable internationally too. I have found my photoshop brushes in India.. and other sites in the middle east. While I was not credited on many sites [some did give a link back] I did leave a brush in each set that had my user name and site information on it. I downloaded a few of my brushes from their sites and my authors brush was left in the set. At first I was irritated but as I had put them out for creative commons use, link back etc rules, I've long since let it go keeping instead what I've learned.