Lemmings At Work: Feb 2009
The lemmings are at work on the web. One person notice something, then everybody else repeats the same thing. The point of view is the same, they just reword blah, blah, blah... Somebody, on 15-Feb-2009, suddenly noticed that Facebook grabs all of your rights for anything that you post on their website! Duh! Facebook's policy has always been there, the current wording is at: Facebook: Terms Of Use. BTW, the terms of use change on regular basis.
People noticed the copyrights grabs from Facebook because Mark Zuckerberg had the disclaimer on his Facebook page. After the brouhaha, Facebook returned to the previous terms of use, but the effect is the same, Facebook owns all the photos, messages posted on Facebook and can resell them for whatever use they want.
When you write a photo blog, follow your own point of view, don't follow the crowd, don't be a lemming. If you are a lemming, what will differentiate you as a photographer/blogger from the next one? What will you do when all the lemmings jump off? Will you jump off too? Most photographers do. We can see it when photographers lower their prices to match...
- The rights grab are not limited to Facebook. All large web organization do the same, such as AOL, Wordpress, MySpace... Check their "Terms of Service" and check the section usually called: "Intellectual Property". They just have different wording, but the results are very similar.
- BTW, I already wrote about it in June-2008 in Facebook.
For this website, I have an idea file divided in 4 sections:
- Books
- Business
- Lightroom
- Trips
Some items in the idea file need to "mature" until ready for publication which may be a few month later.