Is My Copyright Still Mine?

[vyger]

I noticed this sentence in your rules,
You are granting us with a non-exclusive, permanent, irrevocable, unlimited license to use, publish, or re-publish your Content in connection with the Service.
Does this mean that by putting a picture up here that I give you the copyright rights to it to use any way you want? I know some sites do this, claim ownership of what is posted, and then sell whatever they want to advertisers. I hope this is not your policy.
The reason I am aware of this and concerned about it is that I was a photography major in college (actually before digital stuff started) and it was emphasized to us the importance of maintaining the copyrights to our work. When we take pictures they belong to us and cannot be used without our permission or sold to anyone else without compensation to the author. That is the way it is supposed to work. The artist or journalist gets compensation for their work. Today people don't think about it and just take what they want, which as you know is copyright infringement. At the very least a person should ask permission.
Anyway I have a lot of pictures in articles I have written on another web site and the policy there is that I maintain ownership of everything and there is even a copyright notice attached to the articles. In spite of that I have found that some of my pictures have been stolen and are in use on other sites for the purpose of advertising for which they are getting paid. They get paid for my work while I get nothing. Not to happy about that. So I suppose what I am asking is if I post pictures here is someone else going to end up profiting from them? I would be pretty upset if a picture I took ended up on a Friskies bag without me even getting enough to by a bag of the stuff.

 

[Anne]

Thanks for bringing this up vyger . I definitely understand your concerns and appreciate the opportunity to explain.

The purpose of that legal statement is twofold.

1. Once you contribute to the site, be it with text or images, we retain the right to keep your content on our website. That's the standard policy in forums. The goal is to prevent people from leaving and deleting their content (or demanding us to do that for them). If we allowed that, it would disrupt the flow of many discussions, taking responses out of context and generally making a mess of things.

2. We sometimes use images (and text) uploaded by users when creating articles and featuring items within the site, in our newsletter or in or social media channels.

We do not sell images to third parties. That's not what TCS is about.

Note that the paragraph you quoted does not say TCS becomes the copyright owner of the image. While I am not the lawyer who put it together but my understanding is that you retain the copyright. You just give TCS permission to use the image, publish and re-publish in connection with the service. In other words, for the uses I described above but not to sell to third parties. I can assure you that as long as I'm the site owner, that will not change.

Having said that, as you found out by now, images get "grabbed" or "stolen" only too easily. Unfortunately too many people feel like everything on the internet is free for them to copy/take/use. You don't want to know how many times I've filed complaints against people who simply copied our entire website and posted it under a different domain name. Yes, what these people do is illegal but as the copyright owner, you need to a. find out that your content was stolen (not always easy!) and b. be able to pursue the matter with the publisher (often even less easy - as these publishers may not reside in your country).

So, if Friskies ends up using one of your images, you're actually in luck! At least you'll find out about it and assuming you live in Europe or the US, you could probably ask for compensation. Large companies are aware of that which is why they hire their own photographers or use paid stock photography.

However if you take very good photos and upload them anywhere on the web, the images may end up being taken without your permission. You could try and get those websites to take down the images but I don't know of any way to prevent that from ever happening to begin with. If you find a way, let me know! Even scripts that prevent right-clicking an image no longer work and neither does the copyright sign. If that were enough, you'd be covered by the general copyright sign at the bottom of any one of our pages. Trust me, it does not stop content thieves.

If that weren't enough, once you upload images to a website, you agree to that website's Terms of Use. And these are always subject to change (there's always a clause that says that). Which means whatever you upload to those other forums might not have that additional copyright message forever and there's not a whole lot you could do about that. Everything that people upload to their Facebook accounts becomes the property of Facebook. De facto. Sure, you can delete your Facebook account these days but guess what, Facebook may change that policy in the future without notice and without anyone being able to do anything about it. And I won't even start about Google and the information - including images - that they store on their servers.

So, the bottom line is this -

1. TCS won't be selling your images to any third party.

2. If you wish to retain 100% control over your images - now and in the future - you should probably never upload them anywhere on the internet.

I hope that helped clarify things and that you'll continue to share images here, albeit there is a risk they may get stolen (a risk which exists wherever you upload anything to the web).

 

[vyger]

Thanks for the answer. You have cleared things up for me and hopefully others as well.