Social Media And Copyright Dr. Hayleigh
Bosher
The mandate of social
media is sharing content, either individual or third party content. Huge profits are
made by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for example. They have the resources to take on
some of the expense of protecting content, it is not just a generous gift to
all of us. It is very important to keep
an eye on what these are companies are up to. We are encouraged
to share, the more we share, the more money they make, more benefit to the
platform.
Yet the purpose of
copyright is the creation and dissemination of culture, knowledge and information which achieved through the protection of who can copy and how much.
Did you read the terms of use? Probably not. You may think that it is a generous gift from
the internet - no not really... Instagram for example, allows you to keep copyright, but you
grant them non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free worldwide access/use of your content. More troubling, the licence survives even if you stop using the platform feature.
So what does it
mean... you grant them everything...
If the institution
owns your IP through the course of employment, and we upload that content to
social media, we could be in breach of institutional policy.
Social media is becoming very common for classroom use so copyright professionals, others, need to update institutional policies to protect faculty. Or at the very least make sure that faculty are aware of the terms of use from these companies.
- Instagram is selling to AI for facial recognition software - so you can never really get your stuff back
- YouTube - your royalties comes from advertising not from licensing - isn’t that a good mechanism because the purpose of copyright is to ensure a revenue stream for the creator
- Instagram - you warrant that they own the content that they post or it does not infringe.
What constitutes
skill, labour and effort? Do we need to raise the bar when there is an
APP to create a song, produce a photograph? Especially when compared to traditional views
on creation (skilled producer to create a song)
Two camps of
educators... either don’t know and don’t care, just do what they want vs. so
scared that they don’t use anything.
There are companies
and software searching the internet for opportunities to sue the every day users of social media. It is in their best interest and they can also afford to do so.
We need more people to
push the boundaries on copyright limitations.
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