Twitter Doesn’t Claim Rights to Your Photos

by Aaron Hockley on October 18, 2010

Earlier today, popular tech news blog ReadWriteWeb posted an article discussing Twitter’s terms of service and claiming that photographers who post photos on Twitter are giving away the right for Twitter to republish those photos (or sell them) elsewhere. There’s one big problem with this article: you can’t publish photos on Twitter.

TwitteringSure, you can post links to photos… but surely Twitter can’t claim rights over the material which is linked… otherwise I’d expect the ReadWriteWeb crew to be up in arms in that Twitter would be claiming rights to the article itself since it was linked from Twitter.

If one wants to examine the Terms of Service of sites such as Twitpic, Yfrog, or other image-sharing sites that is one thing, but to state that Twitter is claiming ownership of linked content can’t be correct (and even if they were… there is no way it would hold up in court).

There are sites with bad terms of service for photographers… but Twitter isn’t one of them.

Tagged as: legal, terms of service, twitter

  • http://twitter.com/turoczy Rick Turoczy

    I wonder if #newtwitter might be causing part of the confusion? Now, photos appear inline on individual tweets. e.g., http://twitter.com/#!/turoczy/status/27768628247 .

    But as @onetruebix pointed out, this isn’t really Twitter slurping the photo in, it’s simply showing it from its original source. So the photo doesn’t actually live on Twitter.

  • http://twitter.com/theonetruebix The One True b!X

    In the end, I rather suspect that any of these stories are caused by one of two things: (1) lawyers being asked loaded questions and not being directly familiar with the specifics of the site(s) whose TOS is being questioned; or (2) lawyers needing to criticize any given TOS because should they ever find themselves filing some sort of claim against a TOS, they can’t ever have been on the public record as having said the TOS was okay.

  • Louie

    I was thinking the same thing as Rick. The TOS is probably worded in legal language, but grants Twitter the rights to publish your “linked” content in the NewTwitter interface. It’s not like they’re going to start selling prints of your twitpics! :-)

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