successors

No TwitPic, licensing grabs are not okay

Screen shot 2011-05-11 at 21.38.06

If I had a TwitPic account, which I don’t, I’d be feeling somewhat on the angry side right about now. Following a sly amendment to its terms of service and a deal it has just done with WENN news agency, if you upload an image to TwitPic, you also grant it a licence to sell your images. Charming. Oh, TwitPic is very keen to point out that you get to keep your copyright, which is all fine and dandy. But selling your work and taking all the proceeds from it is not.

In case you want some clarification on that, here’s the relevant guff from the terms of service:

However, by submitting Content to Twitpic, you hereby grant Twitpic a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service and Twitpic’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels.

No, that’s very, very not good.

There is, however, some hope.

A much more user-friendly Mobypicture

Have you heard of MobyPicture? No? Well you have now. It does pretty much the same thing as TwitPic – in fact it probably does more as it lets you upload pictures to FaceBook, Flickr, and a few more sites besides, in addition to Twitter – but it has a much more user-friendly terms of service:

All rights of uploaded content by our users remain the property of our users and those rights can in no means be sold or used in a commercial way by Mobypicture or affiliated third party partners without consent from the user.

Move over TwitPic, Mobypicture is heading your way.