As pointed out by the ever observant Nick over at Japanese Light……
Anyone using Blogger for their blogs, and uploading any images they personally care about, would be advised to read the terms and conditions of the new Picasa Web Albums. Especially this golden nugget…..
“…By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Picasa Web Albums, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content through Picasa Web Albums, including RSS or other content feeds offered through Picasa Web Albums, and other Google services.
In addition, by submitting, posting or displaying Content which is intended to be available to the general public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services….”
You may like to know that all images which you, and I, have been posting in recent months on your Blogger accounts, have already been gathered up for Web Albums already…..great news huh? Nope.
There may be some changes to what images appear on this blog, or they might have a beautiful big © mark all across them…we’ll see. Anyway, time for a cup of tea.
14/03/2007 at 10:14 pm
It’s a good point Jeremy… the terms and conditions of a lot of these community/blog/networking sites are very dodgy indeed, especially for professional photographers
It does require a steeper learning curve for sure, but I prefer to run everything under my own domain/web-server, using self-installed blogging software – that way I have *complete* control over everything. Personally I use WordPress, but there are others.
As for image-theft… I dislike watermarked images a lot – it’s just too distracting. A small on-image byline is OK e.g. at the bottom-right of the picture. I think so long as the images are small no “real” publication is going to steal them, and anyone who does use/steal them probably wouldn’t pay you anyway.
14/03/2007 at 11:35 pm
I think that for a blog, watermarking would hardly detract from the image or the point of the post.
Picasa/Blogger have layed down a set of rules we didn’t sign up for and as such starting somewhere else wouldn’t be a bad way to register protest.
But on the flip side, you watermark you photos with your blog name and if the image is used you increse your exposure, making the new system work for you.