Who Owns YOUR Online Stuff

With more and more platforms available to upload your digital creativity online, be it words, audio, and video, many people still don’t understand that in some cases, the simple act of uploading means giving up your creative rights.

There’s a nice article by Kate Bulkley on the Guardian website about this issue exploring the simple question of ‘whose content is it anyway? The article outlines how BBC and Channel 4 embrace the ‘creative commons’ attitude of sharing creativity but the rights retained by the creators.

YoutTube are similar - everything online which is uploaded by it’s users is still ‘owned’ by its creators. Obviously, they are making moeny through advertising but it’s a small price to pay right?  MySpace even recently rewrote its terms and conditions to inform its users that they still ‘retain ultimate ownership, but have given MySpace a licence to use content without payment’ if they post material  online.

The ‘bad boys’ in the whole debate seem to be MTV and it’s UGC site MTV Flux. In their legal small print, they own all the rights, to the extent of having the option to use the content even when you remove it.

I guess it’s a case of not stopping sharing but deciding who to share it through…

Guardian article link