Who Really Owns Your Photos in Social Media?

Source: Mediashift.com

Morel is  a former AP photographer, who was in Haiti during earthquake in January, 2010. In less than two hours, Live images of the destruction from the earthquake were posted on his Twitpic account. The photographs on the account were taken and re-tweeted under another user name in Twitter. AFP took and save those photographs and distributed them under the false credit through its own image service and Getty. They have continued doing it although they knew that the photographs were belong to Morel, and no permission was approved. (Walker 2012). Therefore, Morel engaged The Hoffman Law Firm to send Cease and desist letters to both AFP, their distributor as well as the two companies' clients and subscribers after he realised his work was being distributed without permission (Nicholl 2010).


AFP argued that twitter allowed it to distribute the photos without permission and distribute them through Getty images. Meanwhile, twitter TOS provides users to hold their rights to the content that they published. 

In my opinion, as a credible magazine company, they should find out who is the owner of the picture instead of making conclusion that the picture they found belongs to the owner as stealing pictures and credit are common in internet. Meanwhile, Morel should have included his name on the picture as a credit and this will reduce the problem of stealing credits. Besides that, i think Morel should sue Suraero as he was the one who stole his pictures and credits. 

After his issue, many infuential twitter users started to boycott. Sean Garrett (@sg), part of the Twitter communications team tweeted that “you own your tweets and photos will be part of your tweets,” to a user concerned about ownership (media bistro).


Hence, the photos available online should be belong to the original owner and to use the photos, permission should be granted. Stealing other people's pictures are like stealing people's ideas as known as plagiarizing (Bailey 2013).

References

Bailey, J 2013, The Challenge Faced By Photographers, Plagirism Today, viewed 2nd June 2013, <http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2013/01/16/the-challenge-faced-by-photographers/>

Nicholl, J 2010, We Stole Your Pictures, Now We're Going to Sue You, The Russians Photos Blog, viewed 2nd June 2013, <http://www.jeremynicholl.com/blog/2010/05/03/afp-steal-photos-then-sue-photographer-2/>

Walker, D 2012, Morel Releases More Evidence Against AFP, Getty in Copyright Case, PonPulse, viewed 2nd June 2012, <http://pdnpulse.com/2012/05/morel-releases-more-evidence-against-afp-getty-in-copyright-case.html>