Continuing with the social media theme, I just came across this article from January of this year. The article discusses a copyright case between a twitter user and news outlets. According to the article, this user posted a picture on twitter which some news outlets later published. The judge found that the news outlets were wrong in publishing the pictures because “Twitter’s terms of service did not give the news agency a license to publish the images without Morel’s permission.” While Twitter may allow for the retweeting of pictures, it does not allow for the commercial publishing of them, as said in its terms of use. With social media use increasing, copyright infringement is becoming more complicated. What do you think?
It’s a little interesting to see the courts on the side of a social media user for once. I think this attests to the widening scope of “author.” Even private citizens, with no prior involvements with publishing, can have unintentional copyrights.
It does seem like more and more often people will accidentally infringe on some obscure copyright law. I can only imagine what it will be like 50 years from now
That’s a pretty interesting case. Something similar happened with Facebook recently, as well. There was a class-action suit against Facebook for using people’s profiles to advertise for certain things. I was apparently part of this lawsuit because Facebook used my name to advertise for a company in the News Feed, but did not choose to participate in the lawsuit.