by Kathy E. Gill
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo announced June 1 that the company was partnering with Photobucket to make it easy to share photos at Twitter.com. With a “Twitter native photo-sharing experience,” he said, “users will own their own rights to their photos.” The implication? That this might not be the case with third-party services.
Therein lies the real battle over photo-sharing sites: Who owns what?
Twitter’s Sean Garrett (@sg) echoed Costolo’s message in a tweet: “What’s yours is yours – you own your content on Twitter. Your photos will be part of that content.”
Costolo and Garrett were alluding to a virtual dust-up last month in which World Entertainment News Network (WENN) announced that it had partnered with Twitpic to “sell images posted” on the site and “to pursue legal action against those who use such images commercially without its permission.” Although WENN said it was interested only in photos posted to celebrity accounts, the outcry caused Twitpic to back-pedal and revise its terms of service the next day.
Incidents like this have prompted Seattle attorney Katherine Hendricks to advise photographers to “think carefully about the risk of losing control” over their photographs.
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