[Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 59, Issue 8

[Axel Bruns]

G'day !

Darren Purcell wrote:

> After reviewing the policies on Facebook and intellectual property
> ownership, I am concluding that to use a screen capture from Facebook in a
> book chapter, I need to contact the page creators and NOT Facebook. Is there
> anyone on the list that uses images from Facebook and would share how have
> you handled these issues since the policy changes.

This is more about using actual images from Facebook and similar sites than about using screenshots, but: the Australian public broadcaster, the ABC, has useful editorial guidelines for using materials from social networking sites in its news reports. There are no easy answers here, but their guidelines at least point out the issues - and on that basis, I'd strongly suggest contacting the page creators rather than simply Facebook itself.

An excerpt:

Use in news reports of pictures from social networking sites 

Social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, MySpace) contain pictures that are accessible to mass media organisations. Persons in the pictures may become newsworthy, for example when involved in a natural disaster, accident or crime. Social networking online is evolving, and while in some ways these online spaces are public spaces, in other ways they are private to varying degrees. In many cases users can restrict access to family or friends. Or they may assume that their obscurity protects them, never contemplating that they might come to the attention of mass media.

(http://www.abc.net.au/corp/pubs/edpols.htm)

I'd be interested in hearing about similar explicit editorial policies in other news organisations, by the way.

--
Dr Axel Bruns                                      http://snurb.info/
Senior Lecturer, Media & Communication             a.bruns at qut.edu.au
Creative Industries Faculty, Z1-515, CIP             Skype: LexaSnurb
Queensland University of Technology                   +61 7 3138 5548
Musk Ave, Kelvin Grove, Qld. 4059, Australia       CRICOS No.: 00213J