who owns the contents you upload? - Tutespark week 6

People post blogs, photos, videos etc on various Internet websites. Well, who owns the photo you uploaded? What about the text? Videos? Have you ever thought about it?

The week 6 lecture was about Media, Web2.0 and copyright on the Internet.

Media is a plural word for Medium. The technology and knowledge used by social communities become media of communication. During the early Internet era, the main area of academic study about the Internet was the virtual community and the individual community. People used virtual identity and shared interests in a group, and met new people in the virtual community (Muir, A. 2010, New Communication Technology week 6 lecture, Griffith University, Gold Coast).

From 2000, Web 2.0 was spread by Tim O'Reilly, and the Internet became more interactive. Users started to organise knowledge by tags like Wikipedia (it is called folksonomy), users generating contents like blogs, Facebooks and Youtube became popular, and sharing data with open API such as Google Maps and Amazon (Muir, A. 2010, New Communication Technology week 6 lecture, Griffith University, Gold Coast).


Now, let's examine the copyright issues on the Internet, one by one.



1) Wikipedia

This is the quote from their web page:

"Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which has created a family of free-content projects which are built by user contributions.

Most of Wikipedia's text and many of its images are dual-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). Some text has been imported only under CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-SA-compatible license and cannot be reused under GFDL; such text will be identified either on the page footer, in the page history or the discussion page of the article that utilizes the text. Every image has a description page which indicates the license under which it is released or, if it is non-free, the rationale under which it is used.

Contributions remain the property of their creators, while the CC-BY-SA and GFDL licenses ensure the content is freely distributable and reproducible. (See the copyright notice and the content disclaimer for more information.)" (Trademarks and Copywright, Wikipedia:About, Wikipedia, viewed 8/9/10, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About)

So, this means the text or images in Wikipedia, whether you uploaded it or someone else did it,  is owned by Wikipedia. But we can reasonably re-use them under Creative Commons and GNU Free Documentation License.




2) blogs

Let's see the case of this website I use, Blogspot by Google.

"Google's Intellectual Property Rights. You acknowledge that Google owns all right, title and interest in and to the Service, including all intellectual property rights (the "Google Rights"). Google Rights are protected by U.S. and international intellectual property laws. Accordingly, you agree that you will not copy, reproduce, alter, modify, or create derivative works from the Service. You also agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automated device, or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service. As described immediately below, Google Rights do not include third-party content used as part of the Service, including the content of communications appearing on the Service.

Your Intellectual Property Rights. Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services. You or a third party licensor, as appropriate, retain all patent, trademark and copyright to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Google services and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the members of the public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying and distributing Google services. Google furthermore reserves the right to refuse to accept, post, display or transmit any Content in its sole discretion.

You represent and warrant that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the rights granted herein to any Content submitted.

You may choose to submit, post, and display any materials on or through the Blogger service or Blogspot.com under a public license (e.g. a Creative Commons license), whether by manually marking your materials as such or using Blogger service tools to do so. For avoidance of doubt, Google is not a party to any such public license between you and any third party. Also, for avoidance of doubt, Google may choose to exercise the rights granted under (a) the public license or licenses, if any, you apply to your materials or (b) this Agreement." (Blogger: Terms of Service, Blogger, viewed 8/9/10, http://www.blogger.com/terms.g)

So..... even if I insist the photos I have taken belong to only me, once I upload those photos to the blog, Google can use them for any purpose without any permission, as THEY own them. Gosh!
 



3) Facebook

"Sharing Your Content and Information:
You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:

1.For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content"), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook ("IP License"). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

2.When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).

3.When you use an application, your content and information is shared with the application. We require applications to respect your privacy, and your agreement with that application will control how the application can use, store, and transfer that content and information. (To learn more about Platform, read our Privacy Policy and About Platform page.)

4.When you publish content or information using the "everyone" setting, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people off of Facebook, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you (i.e., your name and profile picture).

5.We always appreciate your feedback or other suggestions about Facebook, but you understand that we may use them without any obligation to compensate you for them (just as you have no obligation to offer them)." (Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, Facebook, viewed 8/9/10, http://www.facebook.com/terms.php)

So everything you post, text, images, photos or videos, they are all owened by Facebook. They can use them anytime for any porpose without any permission nor compensation, even if you deleted the contents as they are still in the back up copies!




This means, if I become really really famous in the future, become a politician or very famous artist or whatever,  blog company or Facebook can publish a book about me using all the contents I uploaded like photos, texts etc, and they are legally allowed to make a fortune without my permission from what I created . In the worst case, they can be nasty picking up everything they can find something negative about me, such as bad photos or unthoughtful opinions, and publish them to attack me or threaten me as well.

Is it the way we have to accept to live in this digital age? I don't think so. I understand the company's point of view to protect their own right, but all those copyright threats are not well balanced and developed to protect both users and businesses. I guess this is still the early age of Internet , same as the old time when people were suffering by the terrible labouring conditions and pollutions during the industrial revolution. The Internet society have to find some solution to be fair to everyone in the community, so that the real rich Internet culture can flourish.