You Don't Own Your Twitpic Photos

You Don't Own Your Twitpic Photos

If you use the popular service Twitpic to post photos to Twitter, here's some interesting news.

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, and to pursue legal action against those who use such images commercially without its permission, according to the agency. “There has been much unauthorized use of Twitpic images which we shall be addressing without delay,” said Lloyd Beiny, the agency’s chief executive.

http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2011/05/you-dont-own-your-twitpic-photos.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/technology/23terms.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&ref=business&adxnnlx=1306155614-5vjZwYiYT21s34CP8ZN3kw

The extent of that control is typically laid out in the terms of service that users agree to when they sign up for Internet services and smartphone applications. But the more such services people use, the harder it becomes to keep track of the things to which they are agreeing. And of course many terms of service, which are heavy on legal language, include clauses that assert the company’s right to change them without notice.

In a recent episode, the television show “South Park” poked fun at the tendency to consent to such agreements without reading them, when one character discovered that he had inadvertently given Apple the right to surgically transform him into a “product that is part human and part centipede, and part Web browser and part e-mailing device.” In the real world, there has been more discussion of what users could be risking than concrete examples of problems. Much attention has been centered on privacy concerns and the confusing aspects of companies’ privacy policies.

:rofl:

Creating a monopoly of service, then by the damage to systems caused by monopolies, none of the terms of service are valid.

I follow some out of courtesy, but also know none can be applied legally to any situation. They are part of a broken system and have no legal or lawful enforcement. Sure they can by edict try to impose something, or by other monopoly followship of other groups get someone to censor or distort something, but they also are doing such things illegally regardless of terms of service.

In a free society, if a service has a social purpose for the advancement of that society, any rule imposed without citizen consent in monopoly fashion is not a legal law.

Well then, no twitpic for me -- I'll just keep linking them the "old-fashioned" way.

:mad:
rocktivity

I'll stick with photobucket.