The UK government has now passed the early stages of legislation on a new law which could see your rights to ownership of the photos you share to social networking sites disappear.
This is a big problem given the current interest in photo sharing apps and services and an emphasis from manufacturers on fast, easy, sharing-based camera-phones.
The Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act was passed in Parliament with Royal Assent just last week, at the end of April. Within the new legislation is a change to UK copyright law which will effectively allow companies to use images which don’t include information identifying the owner for commercial gain.
In other words, your holiday snap taken on your iPhone which you shared to your public-facing Facebook page, could end up in someone’s glossy brochure and you wouldn’t even get a penny, let alone a note asking if it’s ok.
How has this happened?
Well, often when you upload an image to a sharing or networking site it’ll strip out what’s known as the metadata – a kind of digital fingerprint identifying it as yours. Images without this info are called ‘orphan works’ and, by now, the internet is chock full of them.
Previously, however, companies weren’t able to safely tap this rich vein of photo-ey goodness because it was very easy for you to contest the use of your pictures in a court of law, at least if you ignore the cost and the hassle associated with such things. Point is, the law didn’t stand in the way.
Now it kinda does. The new legislation means any photos without metadata get sucked up into something called an ‘extended collective license’ which is a free ticket for anyone to use them.
Before this, in the UK as with many other countries, you were granted automatic ownership of photos you captured. This is even covered by the international Berne Convention and similar wide-ranging agreements. The UK government’s new legislation flies in the face of this.
There’s also no section of the new act which forbids sub-licensing practices, ie: someone can get your photo and sell it to someone else with little risk of repercussions.
This is a very serious problem and I can see it only getting worse.
Why’s that? Well if you look at the last slew of major smartphone launches since the latter half of 2012 one key trend I’ve noticed is an increasing emphasis on comprehensive smartphone camera suites.
It’s not just all about megapixels anymore, it’s about making it fast and easy to shoot decent quality pictures, but it’s also about making it equally fast and easy to edit them on the device in some fun ways before sharing them out on a wide range of social networking and online photo album channels.
The HTC One has the HTC Zoe setup for fast editing and sharing and the BlackBerry Z10 offers a similar range of abilities. Samsung’s Galaxy S4 placed a huge emphasis on built-in photo editing and sharing too.
It goes without saying that devices such as Google Glass will have their camera usefulness dented by the new law too.
On top of this, photo sharing sites and their apps are all the rage – Instagram, Tumblr, Picasa, Flipboard, Flickr, the list goes on and on. Many of these suites are bundled onboard new phones or integrated into Android’s sharing capabilities.
Then of course there’s Facebook, Twitter and the usual slew of social networking sites which have significant photo components.
Interestingly, Instagram tried to enact this kind of commercial sharing approach to users’ content fairly recently but was (quite rightly) shouted down by angry consumers – and yet here it’s happening on a broader scale, by a national government and quietly through the back door.
There’s also not much you can do about getting round the law’s blanket acquisition of your photos either. You can either register your snaps individually at a cost of money, time and effort to yourself (and let’s face it, with holiday snaps who wants to do that?), or you can simply not upload stuff – which is no fun at all.
At present the new legislation is in what’s referred to as the ‘enabling’ stage, in order for it to pass into active law the government will be issuing statutory instruments via parliamentary vote but these aren’t going to happen until later in the year. The likelihood of them not getting through at this stage is pretty slim, however.
The whole thing is messed up purely on principle of what you create or capture should be yours, but the fact that it can be exploited on such a grand scale and in a calculatingly systematic way is rather disconcerting to say the very least.
by pbriden via Featured Articles
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