Ownership of content uploaded to social media sites has been a hot topic in recent months.  The issue has escalated over the past week after a judge declared that two international news organisations were wrong to use an image which had been shared by a member of the public via social media.

The image which portrayed the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake in 2010 had been shared via Twitter and then used commercially by two news organisations. The case has been one of the most high-profile cases surrounding the social media site. 

Whilst it had been argued that once the images had been posted on Twitter they automatically became freely available, the judge said that Twitter’s terms of service did not provide a license which said that organisations could publish the images without the photographer’s permission.

This is not the only social media case which has caused widespread debate. At the end of last year Instagram faced scrutiny after it introduced some questionable changes in its terms of service which some users interpreted to mean that Instagram could sell their pictures without permission. Some of the planned changes were pulled by the company just days later.

Like many of the news snippets we have published over the last few months, copywriting and using photos without correct permissions is still a debated issue which we will continue to monitor. Have you ever had any problems related to this matter?

The Guild of Photographers has provided a full article on this case which is available here: http://goo.gl/qSu55