Copyright and Social Media
Free to access ≠ free to use.
When we’re looking for images and content for our articles, we all know to abide by copyright law or risk the consequences. But if we don’t know what the rules are, we can end up breaking them — and many of us do. If we’re lucky, we just get asked to take the content down. But creators have a right to defend their creation, and they’re within their rights to sue you if you rip off their stuff. Things get shared on social media and elsewhere, and there are rules that still apply in what seems like an internet-enabled Wild West.
You cannot just take images and content off of social media feeds and use it in your own work.
Incredibly, there are journalists who have gone on record saying that this is absolutely fine. What’s more likely is their editors have told them they’ll likely get away with it. Sometimes it happens with no warning — there will be a story involving a member of the public, and their social media feed will be trawled for their drunken holiday snaps (especially if they’re on benefits) without their knowledge or permission. Other times, one of the tabloids spots a picture in a news feed, asks the owner of the photo if they can use it, the owner says no and the paper goes ahead and uses it anyway.
