VentureBeat tried to answer the increasingly common question of where ownership of UGC falls today in their “Ask the Attorney” column. Their answer?
A broad answer is that you own it and, most likely, the service upon which you post it owns it too. The key question is: What terms of use does that service require? In practice, if you want to submit content to any site, then you will have to give the company behind the site the right to your content.
They reached a very similar conclusion to our own Glenn Manishin, when he published a very detailed background and answer to the question in his “Laws of Social Media” series.
Putting all these basic principles together yields precisely the answer posed for social media legal questions generally in Part I of this series — “it depends.” If a blogger structures his site with a fullCreative Commons license, then nothing posted is subject to copyright because he has abandoned such a claim. If a Facebook user posts photographs to his or her Facebook page, and makes them available to friends, a copyright claim likely would not lie against those friends if they used the photos without permission.
The further detail Glenn went into gave us the take-a-way that not all UGC is created and owned equally:
But, as we shall see below, these are the easy situations in which application of IP principles is (relatively) clear.
In the final analysis, this difference is probably more cosmetic than substantive, more about optics than legal rights. Twitter has designs to become the real-time Web’s “utility” infrastructure, so its business model does not require, indeed conflicts with, the company’s ownership or licensing of UGC. Facebook, in contrast, is a walled community, constantly devising ways for user to spend more time (whether or not productive or addictive) on the site. So for Facebook, and especially because any element of a Facebook profile can be made private, including to all other Facebook members, its business needs licensing for the model to work. They are different business models, driving different views of IP law. Just like beauty, in other words, the answer is in the eyes of those with the content itself!
So, chances are you’ll need to understand precedents and apply that to how your content is formatted, republished and used in the context of each social network.
For more “fun” legal analysis, see Glenn’s complete Law of Social Media series…
The Law of Social Media
The Law of Social Media: Who Owns User Generated Content?
The Law of Social Media: Trademarks, Genericide and “Twittersquatting” (Part III)
