Picture this: rights and uses of images in the #hashtag era – Theadanews

Questions like this come up in conversation every day: do I own my photographs, and who can use them?

The simple answer is that yes, you own any intellectual property you create, whether it is made on a sensor with a digital camera, on film with a film camera, on a canvas with brushes, on paper with a pencil, and any other means you can imagine.

The real world answer is a lot more complicated, and is often motivated by greed or a corporations efforts to make itself look good.

A recent example of this came from Delta Airlines, who claim, by tagging photos using #SkyMilesLife and/or #DeltaMedallionLife, user grants Delta Air Lines (and those they authorize) a royalty-free, world-wide, perpetual, non-exclusive license... Time will tell if this is even legal.

Claiming that they own a certain hashtag is, at least in my view, a great example of corporate greed and corporate desperation to control everything within their reach.

I am not much of a hashtag user. I find the hashtag scene, like much of the smartphone-centric web of the past few years, cluttered, yet oddly monotonous. More and more websites that were once interesting now look like the smartphone apps they are trying to compete with.

In the end, of course, if you dont want to support a brand by using their hashtag, dont. And if you dont want to see you images used for ... well, anything you can image across the globe ... dont share them on social media or websites.

Also, while I have you on the line, let me put a good word in for the cloud, which is the name for data storage in a faraway location. Ive heard too many stories about people who drop their smartphones into the ocean on vacation and lose 20,000 photos. Theres no excuse for that. There are good, secure, free cloud sites on the web, and you should definitely be using them. Google, Amazon, iCloud, iDrive, pCloud, OneDrive, and on and on.

In recent years, we are seeing more and more cameras stepping up to the cloud along side smartphones, allowing your photos to stream directly to your cloud service.

If you are intimidated by the idea of setting up and using cloud storage, put those words into a search engine and learn how. You wont regret it.

#usethecloud #youwontregretit

We are making critical coverage of the coronavirus available for free. Please consider subscribing so we can continue to bring you the latest news and information on this developing story.

Read more:
Picture this: rights and uses of images in the #hashtag era - Theadanews

Related Posts

Comments are closed.