In today's world, you can post content online and within seconds millions of potential users can see your post. If you are posting a photo online, like a social media account, you may not 100% own that photo. Many social media websites have terms and conditions, that a lot of people do not necessarily read. When you create your account, you may be agreeing to handing over the rights of that photo or video. Here is a refresher on copyrights for the internet and how your ownership changes with social networks.
Copyright and the Web
In simple terms when you create something, a song, painting, video, etc, you are the copyright owner. This happens automatically, without the need to fill out forms or make any claims. If you believe what you create has potential to make millions, then you will want obtain some documentation to prove you are the creator of said work. This also applies to stuff you post on the web.
According to the US Copyright Office:
Copyright, a form of intellectual property law, protects original works of authorship including literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works, such as poetry, novels, movies, songs, computer software, and architecture. Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed.
- Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, or discoveries
- Works that are not fixed in a tangible form (such as a choreographic work that has not been notated or recorded or an improvisational speech that has not been written down)
- Titles, names, short phrases, and slogans
- Familiar symbols or designs
- Mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering, or coloring
- Mere listings of ingredients or contents
In short, if you have a revolutionary idea, seek legal counsel before you start talking and posting online about it.
One loop hole with copyright is fair use. Fair use allows others to use copyrighted material in certain cases, like:
- Criticism
- Comment
- News reporting
- Teaching
- Scholarship
- Research
Fair use a huge grey area, something we will not dive into any further for this article. The point of this article is to provide you with a low level understanding of who owns the content you are posting online. Now that you know the basics, lets look at how terms and conditions can modify those basics on certain platforms.
The Terms and Conditions of Social Media
Thanks to the terms and conditions, once you upload those photos to the Facebook servers, you have given them a license to reuse those photos however they like. You will not earn any money from that license. The same is true for the majority of all social network. Below are some word heavy excepts from the terms and conditions of various platforms:
- Facebook
- non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license
- Twitter
- worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sub-license)
- Instagram
- non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable, worldwide license
As you can see, the terms are all about the same. They are also vague purposefully. Being vague gives Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook substantially more legal grey areas to work with. At the same time, that large grey area allows retweets to occur on Twitter, or Facebook to post photos to a persons news feed, and your photo showing up in a hashtag search. And these companies can do so without the need to pay you or the worry of copyright infringement.
We will stress that those terms do not negate your copyright to your photos, or videos, or etc. If a photo you post on Instagram shows up on a website, and you did not grant permission to, then you can pursue legal actions. Now remember, most social platforms's privacy policies promise to not allow your content to be seen by anyone, unless you grant that person permission.
It is worth noting that if you connect a platform to another website or service, there is a separate terms and conditions clause you will be agreeing to. The important thing to remember is that most will still state you keep the copyright to your content. The only way you lose your copyright is through licensing like Creative Commons 0
How Content You Post Can Be Used
Services like IFTTT are able to do things like copy tagged Facebook photos to Twitter because of the terms and conditions you grant to Facebook, IFTTT, and Twitter. Many third party companies will use the API's for a social platform to provide you with expanded features. The problem is figuring out the licensing and sub-licensing of your content to third party platforms. In fact some of these companies are not as ethical with your data as you would like them to be.
In theory, big platforms can potentially license your content to other platforms, for free. They have not done that yet and probably will not. The privacy policies put in place by these platforms helps protect your photos from being sub-licensed out to stock photo services and such.
In the end, we are all trusting these platforms with our data and the safety of that data. The copyright for your content always belong to you, but we all agreed these platforms can more or less do whatever they want with that content. And those terms and conditions can change, sometimes without the need of any legal notice.
How to Protect Your Content
Going through every platform available on the web would be an exhausting read. The best advice we can provide is to read the terms and conditions for any website or service you sign up for. Pay attention to the areas that talk about the licensing and sub-licensing you are granting the service. If there is something you do not want being shared, it is best to keep it offline. Or you could create your own service to host that content, but that is a whole other article.
Only use a service who's terms and conditions you are comfortable with. Some services will not sub-license out your content, like Yahoo's Flickr. Another services, Medium, has a clear clause on your content. Your content is only available for display on Medium's website. There are no sub-licensing issues, unless your choose to publich your work under any of the Creative Commons rules.
In the end, you own your content. And you need to be mindful of the licenses you grant to platforms and services on the internet.
When signing up for online bank accounts, new email addresses, or health insurance accounts, they all ask you or force you into using security questions to add an extra layer of protection to your account. The problem is that most these security questions are not very secure. The most common question is "Your mother's maiden name" and one that is easy to guess or research. In fact, if someone gains the correct access to your personal information, it can affect you credit score.
With that, we urge everyone to take matters into your own hands and make security questions more secure. How do you do that? Well, security questions often ask you questions about your life. This is information anyone can potentially figure out from your social media accounts or data breaches, like the Equifax hack. With all of that data online, figuring out the first car you bought, street you lived on when you were a kid, or favorite hobby can be easy. Basically, answering truthfully is a bad idea. Below is the best suggestion to make security questions more secure for you.
Lie
Seriously, just flat our lie on the answers. First car? List your favorite plane, boat, or motorcycle. First grade teacher? Use the name of your favorite pet or the most disagreeable phrase to describe your first grade teacher, like garbage dump. The point is, as long as the data is not common knowledge, something not searchable online or via your social media, it's a good answer. Incorrect answers are inherently more secure than truthful answers.
Keeping Track of the Lies
Here's the problem with using incorrect answers, it can be hard to keep track of all of those answers. We use 1Password to store all our passwords and security answers here in our daily lives. A password manager is an essential tool in today's world, assisting you in storing all of you passwords securely and helping you to create more secure passwords. Honestly, if you have a password manager, have it generate your "incorrect" security question answers. #$Adke@A is a much harder answer to guess than Jennifer, even though neither are the actual name of your high school prom date.
But what about security questions that have canned answers? Well, you still lie! Just note those answers in your password manager. If they give you an option to create a custom answer in addition to canned answers, then choose that option and create your random answer.
Stay safe out there!