FocalPower…the blog

I came across a post over at Photoprenuer today that talks about how Facebook Claims Right to Create Derivative Works from Members’ Photos. Essentially by clicking on that “I accept the Terms and Conditions” check box on Facebook, you are agreeing to give Facebook a perpetual license to use (or sublicense) the photos you upload to their site.

The liberal attitude and actions that more and more organizations are taking to infringe on your rights over your work can be scary. And most of the time you don’t even know that your rights are being taken way form you…when was the last time that you actually read through a Terms and Conditions document? I came across another example of this last year when I picked up a flyer at a botanical garden for their photo contest; if you submitted any photo to their contents you granted them a license to use your work for what ever they wanted…including making prints of it and selling it in their gift shop!

This just shows that you have to be careful and read the fine print. As a photographer, this is especially true on any site where you plan to upload any of your photos. This is one of the reasons why we are building the FocalPower platform to manage and share your photos online using widget technology. The ability to include you photos on other web properties without actually placing them on the servers of those properties. You remain in control of your photos even after sharing them!

Using Facebook as an example (we do not support Facebook yet), you paste the widget code that allows you share your photo on your Facebook profile, but you don’t actually upload your photo to Facebook. When someone views your Facebook profile, that viewer’s browser actually downloads the photo(s) from FocalPower, not Facebook. Two of the main advantages of this are the control and statistics that can be provided to our users.  Another powerful advantage is when you share a portfolio using a widget you can change the contents of the portfolio after you share the portfolio and all new viewers will see the latest changes, regardless of where the portfolio was shared. Alpha Users are now starting to explore the multiple advantages of widgets based photo sharing, so stay tuned.

(Full Disclosure: FocalPower has it’s own set of Terms and Conditions–someone has to feed the lawyers. We do have a clause in there that grants FocalPower rights to use our subscriber’s photos but only for the purpose of marketing the FocalPower services and full credit will be given to all photographers when their work is used in that fashion. {See Section License Granted by Subscriber to FocalPower} The reason we have that clause is to allow us to help expand visibility of our subscribers work.)