Ethical Considerations - Ownership of Images

From looking at my previous blog I think it's safe to say that I use images in many aspects of my life, from sharing and posting on social networking sites to using them in my teaching. However I have to be honest when I say that the ownership of these images is something I had not really thought of and had little knowledge of. Perhaps an even fairer statement to make would be to say that I actually didn't realise the legality involved and hence hadn't given it much thought.

I witness everyday, as many of you will, people sharing and posting images of people, places and text on sites such as Facebook and Instagram. Considering the amount of photos that must be posted on these sites on a daily basis by such a wide variety of people, I think it very much becomes an online world of 'whats mine is yours' when it comes to images. Someone will see a photo of a destination they think is beautiful or a quote they find inspiring so they will save it and post in to their own page, as they want their own family and friends to see it and share their opinion on it.

However from my own research I have come to find this is very much not the case. The rights to a photo almost always remain with the person who takes the photo. The further use of the image must always be agreed by the owner and person who wishes to use it. It can be quite a complicated subject to try and understand but I found a good article that made the basics simple to understand.

          https://alpineinternet.com/2013/10/how-do-photo-rights-and-ownership-work/

The article shows that although you need rights to use photos these can be very easy to get using something called 'Stock Photography'. This is where agencies such as Getty images will license photos in large batches so that you have access to a wide variety of photos at once. I found this information very useful as I have been considering what images we will need on our website. I think looking further into using an agency like Getty images will be a good and safe way to go.

Setting up my Flickr account also furthered my understanding of the rights to images. The site has a very useful community guidelines page. This states that you can only post images that you have created.

                                      https://www.flickr.com/help/guidelines

I am taking this into account with my own new Flickr account. I am still planning to use it as a tool to share images related to my work within teaching and the new website creation I am involved in. But I will be far more careful at considering whether the images are rightfully mine. I've posted the link to my Flickr account below if you wish to follow and see my images.

                             https://www.flickr.com/photos/139806139@N04/

I want to further look into the ownership of images to fully understand what you are allowed to post and share because I think it is especially important within Web 2.0 sites. The power that Web 2.0 holds is the collective intelligence but I think that it means that users have a higher responsibility to educate themselves on the 'netiquette'. Something I now aim to do!