more about why I took off all my… photos
This is further information regarding my post it’s getting hot in here, so take off all your photos.
Titian’s Venus with a Mirror (cropped) Image source: en.wikipedia.org
The following is a direct quote from the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities:
“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.”
I don’t even know what that means exactly, given the added condition of ‘subject to your privacy… settings’. Any exceptionally well informed readers out there who can enlighten me on what this means in real world terms, please comment. There are other aspects to Facebook that leave a bad taste in my mouth too, like timeline. So I’m sticking with my decision to keep my family photos off of Facebook.
From what I’ve read up on WordPress policy, they do not make similar claims to blog content. Bloggers are at liberty to institute their own copyright and or license policy for their blog content. I went down a rabbit hole reading all this stuff tonight. I chose to add a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License to my blog. I’ve also been making an effort to use mostly images ‘labeled for reuse’ or my own images, in spite of the blase attitude I took towards grabbing pictures off of the web when I first started this blog a few weeks ago.
I don’t have accounts on Flickr or Instagram, but from searching images online it seems that Flickr images are not protected overall, but images on Instagram are protected from reuse. Does anyone know if this is correct?
What do you think? Do you have copyrights or license policies on your blog material? How do you protect your images and data online? What do you teach your kids regarding these issues? Have you ever “taken it all off”?
55 comments on “more about why I took off all my… photos”
Honk at me:
Blog posts and images by The Honking Goose are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://thehonkinggoose.wordpress.com/.
The Honking Goose 
I have to say I’m one of those who deactivated my Facebook page a long time ago. Whereas all social media has various degrees of “fine print” that impinges on the users various rights and freedoms (far too many too deal with in a comment section) I found Facebook’s Fine Print to not just border, but cross well over into the ridiculous. Especially in the areas of how they can use things that users have simply “liked”. I won’t get into it all here but to say that like yourself, anything I share on Social Media, I just assume I have no real claim to exclusivity to, and I’m O.K. with that. The manuscript that I am presently working on with hopes of someday publishing will never be seen on the Internet, or at least not until a publication deal has been finalized if I should ever be that successful. But as far as my photographs, Blog postings, and miscellaneous pieces of art and such, if anyone out there wants to share them with me, knock yourselves out. Sorry about the length of this comment.
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I’m with you, man. I hope we can get the message out to the youth that there are pretty simple ways to protect our content better online.
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Interesting post – I have a lot of issues with Facebook. I deactivated my account. But, I found a lot of my material on Google (from Facebook).
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Yikes! Facebook makes it so easy to add content to their website, and easy to steal too, I don’t know why more people aren’t concerned about it.
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Thanks for letting me camp out in your blog for a little while today. I had a great time and tried to leave my campsite as good as when I arrived. I’m following you, so I’ll be back!
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Cheers!
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I heard all you have to do is mail whatever you wrote to yourself and that copyrights it because you have proof you wrote it. You can’t open the envelope. I put the name of the article or whatever I write on the envelope so I know which one it is. It’s called poor man’s copywriting.
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I used to do that. Not with my writing, but with specific ideas I had for products or names.
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I just mailed out a whole bunch of stuff I wrote tonight. Ran out of stamps so will have to do the rest later. For photos you should keep them stored in your phone or camera that way you can prove their yours also. Even with paintings. Take a picture of it before you put it in front of the public.
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I’m not interested in proving that anything is mine. I only put things on the internet that I want to share. That is my point.
Everyone can make their own decision as far as that goes.
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That’s cool.
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“For photos you should keep them stored in your phone or camera that way you can prove their yours also”
Sorry but I can load photos from the web into my camera and by cheating just a bit I can amend the embedded information on date, camera and camera settings
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I wasn’t asking you to load them. I don’t want you too. I apologize for the misunderstanding. I was explaining the same thing you just explained.
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I recently received a ticket from WordPress that they were forced to take down an image I posted. Seems the owner, a chef who wrote a cookbook, from Germany, complained by filing an official form. This chef was upset that I used a picture of his sausage on a plate. I removed the photo to make him happy.
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You can use search.creativecommons.org to find images which you reuse on your site.
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Thanks.
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FB gives me the heeby jeebies. PS…you CANT delete a FB account. I tried. You can only “deactivate” and they constantly send me notifications on my new acct asking me if I know myself lol
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That’s true. I did deactivate my account for a while and then when I went back to it everything was still there.
I’m waiting for the day when FB goes the direction of MySpace and AOL. The FB platform is total junk and timeline is lame. I hear the young folks these days prefer snapchat and tumblr.
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I’m on tumblr! Or was. Couldn’t figure it out 😞
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Actually you can completely close your FB account, but it took me over a year and a half to do it, and now if I even visit a fb page, my account will be reactivated, so maybe deactivated is a better term, but the fact remains, as long as you stay off their site, you’ll be ok. I’m still thinking my situation is one step further along than yours because they don’t contact me ever. My only interaction with fb is when a site wants me to sign in by using fb, and in that case, I always refuse, and if possible, explain to the site admin. why. I’ve actually had many successes at getting pages to change their sign-in procedures, and its getting much easier to do so as more people are speaking up about their dissatisfaction with being forced to use a fb page that they want nothing to do with. Anyway, best of luck with your own battles with them.
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FB owns all u post….. It is evil……
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That is giving me a vague idea for a social media influenced Halloween costume. I need to think about this more. 🙂
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it has always seemed foolish to me to share anything on the web and then think that you have rights or future control concerning what you have shared–
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I know right? Why do people expect it to work any differently?
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Have you ever watched the show Catfish on MTV? It’s a show after the documentary by the same guy and same name. Anyway, it focuses on finding out the true identity of people online, usually someone’s exclusively online boyfriend/girlfriend who are pretty much never who they say they are. One thing I learned from this show is you can drag your pictures into the google search bar and it will come up with any site that has that same photo. You can do this periodically with any pictures you think might be susceptible to thievery. And if you haven’t seen the show, you should check it out! Very interesting how crazy some people are.
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Oh thanks for the tip – I didn’t know you could search images that way. I haven’t seen that show, but I will check it out, it sounds entertaining in the way of rubbernecking at a traffic accident.
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Exactly!
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There is a difference between Facebook and WordPress. WordPress is a publishing medium. You basically have full control of what you publish, how you publish it, when you remove it, etc. With Facebook, you really don’t. Try to delete all your content sometime and you’ll see.
In either case, no matter what the medium you use to publish something, once it’s online, someone else can pull down a copy and do anything with it. It’s not the problem of Facebook or WordPress. It’s your own problem. If you put a stack of prints of your artwork on a table in your driveway and a sign that says “pick one up anytime you like, but don’t claim it as your own,” it would be essentially the same. Stuff of WordPress that’s flagged as public is just that.
That’s the artists conundrum: To be seen, we have to show. To show, we take risks that people either don’t like our stuff, or like it so much, they take it.
Enough honking for me for a day.
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You are right. I have deleted most of my Facebook posts and pics and it took days. Plus there is no way to view it all, even the post on your own wall are selectively visible in response to FB’s algorithm. It’s like they make it deliberately difficult for people to manage ‘their’ content. That’s why I like WordPress so much better. More control.
I like your analogy. It’s just like that, except that anyone in the world could chance by your driveway and pick something off the table.
It is quite a conundrum!
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That is true – Norbert Haupt.
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I watermark my photos with a small signature in a bottom corner of the photo so as to try not to detract from the photo. I went to a workshop put on by a National Geographic photographer who was pretty much of the opinion that there is no way to stop someone from using your photos, watermarked or not.
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I have felt like having a watermark on my family photos is enough to protect them. The WP blog where I post them gets very low views and I can’t imagine why anyone would try and use my watermarked images when there are so many other images out there they could choose from. But I may change my mind about that.
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Disclaimer: I am not an attorney and I present the following as my opinion based on my understanding of privacy statements, or just the way I see it.
The first thing to remember, don’t think that anything is 100% private. Secondly, The inventor and operators of FB think nothing of yours and mine should be nothing private but expect their own personal information to be off limits. They only offer the privacy they do because it is the law and to do otherwise, would result in loss of revenue because of loss of customers if there was absolutely no privacy guards. Next is the idea that they will use your posts, how they want to as long as it is available, either by you still having it active or if someone else that you shared it with still has it active. By utilizing their product (FB), you agree to that.
On my WordPress website, I use my own pics, ones that I own copyrights to if originated from someone else, or, I post with the permission of the owner.
When dealing with photos, it is a tricky slope because if 10% of the people are untrustworthy, then you have the potential for over 3 million people (just in the US) looking to get your stuff and use it for the nefarious purposes (100s of millions worldwide). In today’s world, you and only you can decide what you wish to expose about yourself but if you do, there is some possibility that someone else will decide for you how many others get to see your information.
It appears WordPress specifically makes their privacy statement regarding personal data such as, personal information including financial. They do the other things, such as, share your website, share your comments, etc., based on our agreement to “follow” each other. Plus, they look at our trends and recommend you and I to others or others to us based on that agreement.
Lastly, don’t think that anything is 100% private. Just be careful and take privacy blocking precautions whenever possible.
Just a thought.
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Privacy protections are important to have. But at the same time it gives people a false sense of security when they put their data and pictures online. Like in the case of the naked celebrity photo iCloud leak.
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I have stuff spread all over. I’ve been a forum-poster and stuff is spread over several different systems– so I’d have the devil of a time just finding it all. I have found my stuff posted on other people’s sites– but it was stuff that I wouldn’t scream about anyway.
As I understand it, your stuff has a “copyright” the moment you post it anyway– not that anybody pays attention to it, but as long as you can prove it’s your original content it has that copyright. Beyond that, way back in the days when I had my own website, a note at the bottom of the opening page that everything on my site was copyrighted seemed to be enough.
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I used to post a lot in a particular forum (years ago) and then one day I realized I didn’t want all that stuff attached to my online identity and I went back and painstakingly erased each comment one by one. That was probably the first time I started thinking about the online footprint I was leaving.
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Sticky area. As you said, blase attitude is what gets you into trouble if and only if the person knows about it. A few years ago I had a blog that took off and was getting 25k-30k hits a day. Due to fact I was just writing about fun Hollywood crap or other news. Taking pictures of whomever off net. I started getting messages about copyright infringement with timelines to remove image. After the 7th or 8th one I pulled site down. I didn’t want the hassle
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Right, good to know.
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I believe all you need to do to add copyright is make that statement somewhere on your blog, including the copyright symbol. Should your image be lifted and used, however, I wonder if any user is likely to know – or have the resources to follow up? It’s a difficult area. I am considering adding an image credit similar to that on the Perelin Colours blog. It’s a small deterrent, at least.
On another note, Is anyone else not on Facebook? Am sure it’s excellent for blog marketing, but have reservations on many levels…
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My end point is that if people are really committed to protecting their material, they shouldn’t publish it on the internet. And if they do publish online, they should expect some sharing to go on.
Facebook is worse than lousy and I can’t wait for the day it goes in the direction of MySpace. There are already way better engineered platforms in common use on the web. And as I understand it, young people today are using things like Snapchat and Tumblr much more than the old fogey Facebook.
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i’ve always believed that once we publish anything in the public domain it is automatically copyright, well, that used to be the convention and a friend tells me that legally that should still hold but nowadays no one seems to be sure..and facebook and others act as if they are laws unto themselves. Frankly, i’m not sure what to think but i thank you for making people aware of this.
My best to you
john
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Sure, and I believe that once we publish in the public domain of the internet, we should assume and expect a degree of sharing to go on.
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Good question. I need to protect my writing with a small copyright words
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I see many people doing that. However, my opinion is that if we put our work in the public domain of the internet, we should expect a degree of sharing to go on. That is why I chose a Creative Commons license. You can find more information about that here: http://creativecommons.org/
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I see. Thanks.
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You can watermark your photos if you’re afraid of people taking them. I don’t but I know people that do.
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I have another wordpress blog where I post family photos and I do watermark all those, right across the middle of the image, usually.
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Awe! So many people have several blogs. I just have this one. I thought about watermarking mine but it ruins the picture for me.
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My other blog has a very specific focus and a small readership. It’s mostly for keeping extended family updated with happenings and pics of my kids. I don’t want anyone using photos of my kids for advertising or solicitation, and I think watermarks are the easiest way for me to protect the images. After that, I’ll take my chances. I haven’t bothered with trying to copyright any of it.
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What is ur other WP called?
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Can you get a copyright done on a free WP blog?
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I don’t know what the steps are to copyright your material. I’m not aware of any reason why you couldn’t.
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At least in the United States, any content that you make is applied an “all rights reserved” licence by default. You should include some copyright text as outlined in the content theft help page.
You can also apply a different licence to your work, such as one of the Creative Commons licences.
I’m not a lawyer, by the way, so don’t take this as legal advice, accurate or otherwise.
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Thanks!
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