Hypothetical:
To give you an idea of how your images may or may not be used according to the TOS, let’s pretend we have a photographer, Melissa, who has posted a photograph of a cow on top of a lighthouse.
A. Can the hosting company create a coffee table book called Stranger than Fiction, which includes Melissa’s photograph?
Photobucket — yes. Twitter — maybe. All other sites — no.
Common Terms:
Before offering our recommendations, it’s helpful to review the basic contours of the TOS. These are general areas of common ground, but you should review the specifics of each site’s TOS before posting.
The companies acknowledge that they are not getting a copyright interest in any of your photographs. (When discussing photographs, unless noted, the same would generally be true for any media).
Terms of Service (TOS) Considerations
As you decide whether to post images on a social networking site, you’ll have to keep in mind the great difference between legal rights and technological capability. Although we strongly recommend that you read the TOS for any site before you post any images, we want to warn you that the terms are only one consideration. Although they provide some shape to the legal landscape of your rights and the rights of the hosting company and other users, they are also limited in their practical effect for at least four reasons:
ASMP commissioned attorney Chris Reese to undertake a review of the Terms of Service (TOS) of six social media sites and to prepare findings and recommendations. The sites included in his assessment are Facebook, Photobucket, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter. This report presents recommended best practices, considerations, common terms used, and hypothetical situations photographers may face when images are posted on social networking sites.
Last month the United States Copyright Office published changes to the registration polices for groups of published photographs using the Electronic Copyright Office or eCO. Previously, only individual published photographs or groups of published photographs “in the same unit of publication” were eligible for registration using eCO. The new regulation allows groups of published photographs to be registered using eCO.