Message posted by Angus Batey on January 12, 2012 at 0:04:41 PST:

This is a subject I know a fair bit about, though my focus is on the UK not the US: the laws are broadly similar though there are differences in detail.

As a general rule of thumb, copyright in any creative work - which includes photographs and written posts to online discussion forums - belongs to the person who created that piece of intellectual property (the image; the arrangement of words) UNLESS that person has sold or given away their copyright to someone else.

Normally you have to sign a contract to assign your copyright to someone else - I'm a freelance journalist and it's increasingly common for client publications to issue writers with a contract that specifies that any work we do for them becomes their property and we have to surrender all rights in it (usually they demand these rights without offering any extra payment: with a very small number of exceptions, I never sign such contracts, but a lot of people do).

Another way you would not own copyright in your intellectual property is if you create that work during the course of your employment - in which case, your employer would own the rights. So, a journalist on staff of a newspaper or magazine doesn't own the copyright in the work they do, it belongs to the publisher - and a photographer employed by USAF will not own the copyright in the images they shoot at work, that'll belong to the US government (though any pictures they shoot at home or on holiday with their own equipment will be their private copyright). How this might apply to forum posts people make while sat at their work computer I don't know - clearly you're not "doing your job" if posting here from work (unless there really *is* an Area 51 "mole" doing a Disinfo op here...!), but you are using your employer's resources and are doing it on their dime so I imagine if they found out and there was some value to them in it they may wish to enforce a claim.

The other way you lose your copyright in posting to social media websites/apps is by not reading the small print when you sign up for a particular web service, and giving it away without realising (or possibly you do read the small print, understand it, and give it away by choice - but most people don't read those terms of use, they just click "accept" without considering what it may mean). A lot of places actually acquire your copyright in whatever you post within their terms of service. Facebook did this for a short time a few years ago - I deleted my account because of it, and after a while they changed the terms back, but I expect them to try it again in the future. Some sites are more nuanced in how they perform this "rights grab", often including words like "you retain copyright but grant an irrevocable, unlimited license to us to publish, re-use, distribute, edit, alter, and make derivative works of, your submissions". They rationalise this by invoking the concept you mention, AllisonW - that they need the right to "make unlimited copies" because it's a web business and if they don't have that right, then they can't legally host your photo/text and have lots of people look at it. But the devil is in the detail, because the terms they often use also allow them to re-sell your material and not pay you a cut of the profit if they do, and when they say stuff like "make derivative works of..." what they actually mean is, "If your web post gets optioned by a Hollywood scriptwriter and turned into the plot of a blockbuster movie, we keep all the money and you get nothing" or "When that photo you just posted here gets put on a t-shirt and we sell thousands of them and make a heap of cash out of it, you don't get any of that money either." To the best of my knowledge, DLR doesn't operate on this basis, so all posts to this forum will remain the copyright of the person who posted them, unless one of the other conditions applies.

One final point worth noting: there is no copyright in ideas, only in their expression. This is important for a working writer, as it means it's perfectly legal for you to read what someone else has written, understand it, and then rewrite it in your own words - but it is a breach of that person's copyright to simply copy what they've already written and republish it without their consent.

Hope this is of help.

Cheers,

AB

In Reply to: Re: New Area51 Google Earth Imagry posted by Allison Wunderland on January 11, 2012 at 14:03:13 PST:

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