Photos on Twitter are Copyright Protected too
In January of 2010, Daniel Morel, a professional photojournalist, was in Haiti when an earthquake struck. Within a few hours, he had taken hundreds of photos and uploaded a select few onto Twitter. A photo editor at Agence France-Presse found them being passed Twitter, under another user’s name, and he put them into the AFP photo system, which linked to Getty Images. On Friday, a jury ruled that AFP and Getty would have to pay Morel $1.2 million for willfully taking and selling his pictures.
On its face, this case seems simple: Even if you publish a photo on Twitter, no one else can take it and make money off of it. That’s what judge Alison Nathan decided last January—that the two companies had infringed on Morel’s rights. The question this time around was whether they knew what they were doing, and how much they’d have to pay for that mistake. And a jury thought it was clear that the two photo agencies did, in fact, know what they were doing, and that they had behaved badly enough to earn the maximum penalty.
What’s striking about the facts of this story, though, is not how unusual they seem, but how typical. A photo editor is at his desk, getting desperate for pictures of an event just hours old; he finds the perfect images floating around Twitter, and while it’s not clear who owns them, it’s not clear that they’re off limits; he makes a quick decision just to go for it. Decisions just like this get made in newsrooms every day; most don’t cost the organization $1.2 million. And because so few publications or news agencies get called out or pay the price, newsrooms bend copyright rules so often that it starts to seem okay.