Well I was just doing a bit of research on a new post about photo hosting sites for photographers/designers ect however it seems a lot of these sites seemed to have followed Twitpic by granting themselves a "non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce..." - http://twitgoo.com/a/terms
With most photographers designers and artists using these sites to share there work and publish it for all to see but not to use, this post is designed to highlight the image hosting sites to avoid and the ones to use.
Other Sites that are following this line too:
Lockerz
http://lockerz.com/ - Terms to be found at http://lockerz.zendesk.com/entries/515604-terms-of-service - Section User Feedback and Submissions - Automatically grant Lockerz a perpetual, worldwide, unlimited, irrevocable, transferable, assignable, sublicenseable, royalty–free license to use the Submissions, and exercise all copyright, publicity and other rights with respect to any such Submissions; and (d) subject to existing laws, waive any moral rights you or your licensors have in any such Submissions.
Twitgoo
http://twitgoo.com/ Terms to be found at http://twitgoo.com/a/terms - Section 6.1 - Twitgoo does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, applications, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you post on or through the Twitgoo Services. By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the Twitgoo Services, you hereby grant to Twitgoo and other users a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels.
Good new though! Not all sites have gone this way and there are a few still that allow you to upload your images and keep all your rights to yourself!
Twic.li
http://twic.li/ Twic is the first site I have come across so far that is not granting its self a licence to sell and or use your images.
"Twicli has been designed with user experience in mind. We want the site to look and feel like Twitter offering a seemingly seamless transition from one site to another.
Users can upload photos and videos and comment on each, these comments are then broadcast on twitter via the means of @replies. The Twicli frontpage features the most recent content uploaded by Twitter users." - http://www.ruhanirabin.com/5-cool-photo-sharing-alternatives-for-twitter/
Pikchur
http://pikchur.com/ Terms to be found at http://pikchur.com/terms
TwitrPix
http://twitrpix.com Terms found here http://twitrpix.com/terms Section 3 < Whilst you grant them a licence it is for use on there site only.
And of course the orignal recommendation of Yfrog is still all good. So its not all doom and gloom we have at least 3 sites to host images.
(Correct as of 25/05/2011 10:54am GMT)
I believe the part of our ToS that you're referencing is:
ReplyDelete"By posting or making User Content available through the Site or via the Services, you hereby grant to TwitrPix a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, worldwide license to use, copy, modify, prepare derivative works from, distribute, publicly display and publicly perform (whether by means of a digital transmission or otherwise) and process your User Content, or any part of it, solely on and through the Site and Services, including without limitation (a) adapting the format of your User Content (for example by encoding or transcoding) for suitable display on the Site"
When you upload / share a photo, we are automatically given a royalty-free license in order to serve that photo with the world regardless of where the visitor happens to come from (re: "a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, worldwide license") using our service. Without this, no photo sharing site would be able to operate if they had to pay a fee to the user in order to help them share photos. It simply wouldn't work. Like most, ours is a free service so it works hand in hand.
By sharing a photo, the intent is to make it public. Every photo has a permalink, you give us the license to display your photos to anyone using our service either over the web, mobile, search results, etc. (re: "distribute, publicly display and publicly perform"). Also in specific cases, we need to modify your photos to create thumbnails, different sizes, etc. throughout our service (re: "copy, modify, prepare derivative works").
One important aspect is that we clearly state that you are not providing us a license to take your photos and license them elsewhere. There's a fine line that some sites walk when it comes to this. We believe this is rather unfair and have blogged about it here http://bit.ly/lE3v8i.
Its important for all users who share media to understand the Terms of Service from any site that they utilize, ours included. Thanks for writing about this and helping other users be aware.
Best regards,
Jerry Thompson
TwitrPix