Girl suing school district for using Facebook picture

[Mark Suszko]

I’m not a lawyer, but… could be the new title of this forum, but my two cents:

Facebook TOS is very proprietary in the sense that they reserve the right to exploit any images you share for themselves and their partners alone, and you agree to that. So if the school got the image by buying it from Facebook, they are fine. If all they did was copy it from the internet off an unsecured site without the girl’s permission, they need to hire new lawyers for that district., because she’s going to win that suit.

This is not to say the girl wasn’t an idiot for over-sharing or not adjusting her privacy settings; she was. I bet 90 percent of facebook users have no clue how to set their privacy settings, or why. And as such, the girl in question probably does make an illustrative case in training kids to be more circumspect in posting. But as they proved in the Virgin Mobile case, that doesn’t get the school or a company off without paying for the right to use the image

The next seminar the district needs to conduct is one for staff about not using uncleared images to illustrate your points.

[Steve Martin]

It’s going to be an interesting few years as social media continues to take hold in society.

One the one hand people are freely giving up an unprecedented amount of personal information on social sites like fb and others. On the other hand, public perception of that information being “free for the taking” is also exponentially increasing.

Back in the day, it might have been easier for our productions to be obscure because they were limited by physical distribution (i.e CDs, DVDs, VHS, etc…). With YouTube, Vimeo and others, our work can be seen by anyone on the planet. And anyone of them are capable of making a claim that we used their materials without rights – looking for a quick payoff!

In my many years on this forum, the prevailing wisdom hasn’t really changed much: If you don’t own it, don’t use it. But in a world filled with electronic media, that simple rule is more important then ever!

Production is fun – but lets not forget: Nobody ever died on the video table!

http://www.OmniNewMedia.com
http://www.GreenSlateStudios.com

[Craig Seeman]

[Steve Martin] “freely giving up an unprecedented amount of personal information on social sites “

[Steve Martin] “On the other hand, public perception of that information being “free for the taking” is also exponentially increasing. “

There’s a lot of confusion over this and I suspect there’s going to be a growing number of case law created around this.

Things to keep in mind might be, that according to a social media agreement the site may have the right to reuse what you post for the site’s promotion in perpetuity but that may not mean you relinquish your right to repurpose license or sell the rights to another party. There are additional complexity in that in some cases if you remove such items from the social media site, their license to reuse may cease and in other cases, not.

Even if you just follow some the justice dept. cases involve Twitter, you may find that Twitter’s position is that you retain ownership of your tweets even if Twitter is a repository which stores them for some time and may not have any right or authority to use or hand over such tweets. Not that Twitter’s position won in court but it’s key to understand that these cases (case law) are evolving and that user agreements vary amongst social media sites.