Fine Print Blurs Who’s in Control of Online Photos, NYT article.
World Entertainment News Network, a news and photo agency, announced this month that it had become the “exclusive photo agency partner” of Twitpic, a service with over 20 million registered users that allows people to upload images and link to them on Twitter. The deal allows the agency to sell images posted on Twitpic for publication...
So... there's a free webservice where people can post their photos online for the world to see, and suddenly there's this one and only company who has the right to sell them and charge for them and pocket all the profits?
ReplyDeleteWhether these become public domain when posted, or their authors keep otherwise their respective publishing rights, the only comment I can make upon hearing this news is "WHUCK?"
Reminds me of that saying: "The Bible is like a licensing agreement, most people click `I agree` but couldn't suffer the boredom of reading it through."
Some companies seem to believe this gross trick grants them license (a PUBLIC license, of course!) to circumvent existing laws.
Well, I've got news for you, big-ass execs: even if you trick people into signing a long-winded obscure legalese mumbo-jumbo agreement with illegal clauses that you "just hadn't insisted on", doesn't make them legal!
Of course, the main practical alternative is to simply NOT post online photos that you wouldn't want commercially hijacked, but really, that's a directly liberticidal perversion of the intrinsic awesomeness of the innurnet.
And, like, man, this blows. So, way I see it, it's gotta be unconstitutional.
The very first pictures I posted on the web, I posted on my own domain. I'm still amazed by most people not getting their own domain. When you don't, it's like living on somebody else's couch. And it's really just a couple of days' work to buy the domain and learn how to put something on it.
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