In the already confusing world of digital photo ownership, Social Media has done plenty to further muddy the waters. A year or so ago Pinterest apologized to everyone for having a user agreement that stated that they owned your pictures. Now Instagram is in the news backing down and re-writing their policies and assuring you that you still own your pictures. Oh, really? What does this ownership really mean?
I’m going way out on a limb here and say that you might have intellectual property rights, but once you publish a picture on the Internet your effective rights go out the window. What do I mean by that? Anyone can share, download to their harddrive, alter, or otherwise mess with your picture. Do they have the legal right? Probably not. Do they have the ability anyway? Absolutely.
One of the sadder examples of how badly this can be misused is badly intentioned men who gather pictures of children and teens and then put them up on porn sites. Not naked, not posed in any particular way, just a teen girl washing a car, or a cute toddler in his mother’s arms. Underneath are captions that would sicken the average person. But these men just right-click and save whatever they want – and yes, guys, it is men doing it. Can you prosecute them if you find your daughter’s picture on one of those sites? Well if you can find the site owner or the hosting company you may be able to request that they take it down. They may or may not comply. You will probably not succeed in finding out who posted the picture because they hide behind anonymous user names.
What about just day-to-day image theft? Well, if you are a professional in the Internet industry you probably try not to do it. You probably have a Shutterstock or Shutterpoint account or you use royalty-free images from WikiMedia Commons. But sometimes you may still be tempted to save an image of something harmless like Facebook’s logo and use it to illustrate a point. And no one probably cares.
When it comes to Social Media the truth is that once it is up there, it is replicated on servers around the world, even just on that one Social Media platform. On Facebook, for instance, when you post a picture it goes into your newsfeed and is shot out to your friends. When they click, “Like” or comment it goes into their newsfeeds for their friends to see. And don’t even get me started about Pinterest, Flickr or any other “sharing” service. Just know this – do NOT put pictures up of anything you want to maintain control of. Really.