New social network Tsu made people wonder what would happen if you create original content, – texts, photos, videos, whatever – and share it on Tsu. Are you handing over all your rights?
Afraid of the wall of text? Scroll down to the tl;dr version and conclusions.
The fine print in the terms and conditions seemed to contradict the simple statement in the Tsu FAQ ‘The entire point of tsū is that the content you publish is yours’.How bad is it and how does Tsu compare to other social media? The rules and regulations differ depending on the kind of creative content you produce.
Photography is not only one of the older crafts, it’s also a reasonably well-organized business with established rights and licenses so let’s assume we share a photo on a social network and see what happens according to the fine print they all have. As an author, designer or video producer your case will be similar.
We will compare the two powerhouses Facebook and G+ with newcomers Ello (devoid of any commercial interest) and Tsu (as commercial as you can get). The actual terms in the fine print of all four all start with the promising statement resembling ‘It’s your content’.
Facebook offers the most human readable introduction ‘You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. Sounds nice and it’s very affirmative compared to the weaker statement by Tsu ‘We do not claim ownership of any Content that you post on or through the Service’, which is as good as identical to Ello’s wording.
Google uses the more legalize ‘You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content.’ but follows it with the clear position: ‘In short, what belongs to you stays yours.’ The wording may be different, but legally these are all similar statements
Conclusion 1: All networks pay lip service to your right to your content, but as you will see, they all follow it up with very tricky disclaimers and if there is a devil, it will indeed be in the details
There is always a ‘but’ and it’s worded in similar terms. Let’s take Ello, the network which is backed by a non profit organization, has sworn never to show ads and should be friendliest on its users:
'However, when you post or transfer Content to the Ello Services, you give us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, world-wide, perpetual, transferable license to use, store, reproduce, adapt (so we can properly post your Content), distribute and publicly display your Content in order to provide the Ello Services.'
So as a photographer (your assumed role for this post) you just gave away a free license to your photo. Non-exclusive so you can still sell it to someone else, but often the commercial terms you enter when you actually manage to sell a photo are that you provide the owner an exclusive license. After posting it on Ello you are no longer in a position to offer exclusivity to any client. Certainly a bummer so you should avoid posting your photo on Ello?
Maybe you should reconsider posting on any social network if this would concern you. Facebook, Google and Tsu all state that you give them a license. Google doesn’t want to tell you if it’s exclusive or not, just ‘a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works […], communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.' Fb and Tsu are both explicit in non-exclusive. Not that it makes a difference; if you happen to have the money to take it to court every judge will agree with you that you didn’t mean to give Google exclusive rights.
Conclusion 2: you lost your own exclusive rights when you posted on any of these social networks.
In legalese we could look at the other technical terms like ‘worldwide’, ‘transferable’, perpetual, irrevocable but we won’t as there is hardly a difference between the four networks. What matters to real people are things like ‘can you get out of this license for that specific photo’. Not if the agreement in itself is irrevocable, but if you can pull your content and get your complete rights back.
Well, you can’t. Facebook is very nice and says no problem, but follows it with ‘, unless your content has been shared with others and they have not deleted it’. Good news if you’re a lousy photographer and nobody cared to share it, but otherwise you’re just as stuck as with Google's ‘This license continues even if you stop using our Services’, Ello or Tsu just use ‘perpetual license’ to make sure you will never own that content exclusively again.
Conclusion 3: your soul belongs to us and you will never get your rights back whatever you do
So these social networks now have a license on your photo / artistic work. What can they actually do with it? Unfortunately everything! Really everything: use it as promotion material, share it with other companies, change it to make it fit their requirements, offer it as part of a new service. If you look closely enough there is not that much of a difference between the four networks.
On face value the nicest of the bunch seems Google as they tell you ‘The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones.’
So it’s limited, but to what? If Google wanted to start a new service ‘Ready Made Images’ if could offer your photo as part of that new business. You agreed to ‘give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license’. So even another company could use your creative work as you already agreed to that when signing up.
Tsu asks for the broadest permissions as they claim the right to ‘reverse engineer’ your work, but you would be safe from that as it’s impossible to offer software through Tsu. More worrying are terms like ‘sell, lend, rent’ as options you gave them when posting your creative work.
However both Ello and Google also state that they have the right to distribute your content or transfer it to others (‘transferable license to use says Ello’) Ello also point to other users ‘you are agreeing to allow other Ello Services members and members of the public [..] to view, distribute and display your Content’. Google limits these rights to itself and ‘those we work with’. whoever that might be.
Facebook seems to offer the best terms here as they limit themselves to ‘to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook’ but as they earlier claimed the right to sub-license it (meaning someone else could get their rights) your legal status is still hopeless.
(Unclear at the moment: is Ello’s explicit permission that other users can distribute your work worse than the basic conditions of the other three networks? Readers in the know?)
Conclusion 4: all social networks can legally do whatever they want with your content. Sell it, change it, transfer it to another company, give it away or delete it
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Tl; dr version: after close-reading all Terms and Conditions of the four networks it’s impossible to pick a winner. Facebook, Google, Ello and Tsu offer very similar conditions which drill down to ‘It’s your content, but we can do whatever we want with it’.
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If your business depends on having an exclusive license on your work, you should avoid all four, otherwise just pick a (combination of) network(s) which presents your creative work in the best way possible and to the audience you’re after.
Ello is a great network if you want to invest in an ad-free, clean looking platform, but it doesn't offer photographers and other creatives a large audience and the T&C is just as bad as elsewhere.
Facebook offers potentially the largest audience, but it's filters don't show all content to your fans Without spending money on promotions you're not sure it will actually reach people. Best avoided unless you only want to show it to close friends and family.
*If you want to monetize your work on social media your only option is Tsu which will pay you a share of the ad revenue based on the popularity of your work.* An interesting model for photographers looking for some income from the sharing of their work.
If you are happy with eternal fame and the gratitude of your audience G+ is currently your best choice as it already has a warm climate for creative content
Ello and Tsu are invite only networks. For Tsu just use the link tsu.co/MaxHuijgen and register. I also have a few invites for Ello left for serious photographers. PM me.
image by Frits Ahlefeldt-Laurvig / CC license 2.0 #SocMed
