This is semi-old news, but a surprising amount of my friends and fellow artists (especially at school) do not know this, so I thought I would be informative today. I do not post any of my work on Facebook or Myspace, and neither should you. It’s not that I don’t desire to get my work out there, and social networking sites seem to be a logical option for showing work to vast numbers of people. However, just this year such sites (specifically Facebook) have come under scrutiny by artists and photographers because of their terms and conditions all users agree to when they join and use these sites. Basically, within their terms of service (http://www.facebook.com/terms.php) any content you upload to Facebook automatically becomes theirs to use in promotions, repurpose as they see fit, etc. They claim you still retain all your rights as creator, but they are in effect grabbing a huge chunk of your rights to your work. It’s quite scary really. And, to make matters worse, if you have already uploaded work to these websites, and then delete it off the website, under the clauses Facebook is allowed to keep backup copies of it on their servers for a unspecified time period. Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do about this if you’ve posted then deleted work as I have (I removed all my work a couple months ago), but it serves as a warning in the future to never post work on those websites again. If you are doing commissioned work as well, you should also try to prevent at all possible your clients posting your work created for them on these websites (you are legally allowed to decree what can and can’t be done with your work as a creator and copyright holder).
So what websites are safe to post work to? It’s hard to tell anymore, but always read the terms of service before you begin to use any website you post work to. Flickr, unfortunately, while exceedingly popular with the photographer and illustrator crowd, is not as safe as you would like (some of their terms of service are almost as sketchy as Facebook’s). In fact, it has kind of become a “stock” image website, rather like Google image search, with random people using your images for whatever they please. If you do post to Flickr, don’t upload the high-resolution versions of your work (1000 px at 300 dpi is plenty big enough for web viewing, and will only produce a tiny print if someone tries to print at that size), try to watermark all your images (you can find plenty of tutorials around on how to do this with a little photoshop magic), and use the artist comment section below every image to place a notice of copyright. You can also, through Flickr’s interface, attach a Creative Commons license (link) notice badge that will appear wherever the image shows up. DeviantArt is very artist-friendly as well, but still, remember to watermark, never post the high-res version, and attach a CC badge (which dA also supports). If you are a student, websites like 5oup.com and myartspace.com that are oriented around the student and emerging artist are nice as well, and more likely to be copyright-friendly (but still read those terms of service!).
Blogs can also be a nice way to get work online, but you must be careful with who you host your images with. I have already gone through the issues with Flickr, and while I have not checked the terms of use from Photobucket, there is probably some of the same issues there. In any case, it’s back to the rule of always reading over the terms of use before you upload. Most blog websites do have clauses in their terms of service that you may not like, however.
In my opinion though, the best way to show your work online is to have your own website where you are in control. Website-building sounds very scary to some artists, especially those who are not computer-savvy, but it is actually very easy to do. Domain names are often as cheap as $10 a year, and to get your domain name hosted is about $5-$10 a month for a bare-bones bandwidth plan. Some places such as GoDaddy.com will give you a deal if you buy a domain name and a hosting package at the same time. I personally lucked out and have a friend who owns his own server so I get my website hosted for free.
You don’t even have to design and build your website yourself (though I enjoy the challenge of hand-coding and designing mine. However it’s still not finished). There are plenty of online companies out there who sell website templates for cheap, where all you have to do is drag and drop your images into the template and write in your text content. Or you could always just pay a starving graphic design student to whip something up for you. Artists websites are seriously the easiest websites to make, you don’t have a lot of pages, and as long as the images look nice and are easy to view you’re good to go.
The great thing about having your own website is that all your images are hosted by you, and not through an external site such as Flickr or Photobucket. This is especially nice if you post your images on a blog such as this, any linking to the actual image is routed through your site. Open an image of mine from this blog in a new window and you’ll discover in the address that it’s hosted from my site.
Through your own website you can also make sure that you have adequate notices of copyright posted throughout. A Google search for copyrights will come up with plenty of links on how to properly copyright your work. Creative Common badges can also be applied to your website and not just through large websites like dA and Flickr.
Navigating the tricky world of copyrights, especially online, can be very tough. I am nowhere near as vigilant as I should be (I still have yet to put watermarks on my images, and I shouldn’t reaaaaally post my images on here as WordPress.org’s terms of service are a little scary as well), but I do try to avoid the major pitfalls of the online world. I hope I’ve at least helped you out in some way, and encouraged you to take your work off the really bad websites like Facebook. I don’t want to discourage you from posting your work online however, I’ve met some great people through sharing my work online, and the fact of the matter is, most employers are now looking at work online rather than in person, so it is important to have work out there in the digital realm.
This is just a handful of links concerning these issues, you can do a Google search for Facebook photography copyrights or Facebook terms of service and come across a multitude more.
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blogs/gelman/archives003726.shtml
http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=700094
http://www.lightstalkers.org/copyright-grab-by-facebook-
http://thelittlechimpsociety.com/theape/facebook-illustrators-be-a-ware/
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/tech/internet/facebook-legal.html
http://www.jmg-galleries.com/blog/2008/02/27/facebooks-rights-grab-how-far-does-it-go/
http://mingo-pe.blogspot.com/2008/04/facebook-copyrights-and-you.html
http://blog.keithrowell.com/tag/bollocks
This was an interesting article I came across while researching for this post on the politics of social networking sites like Facebook.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook
Perhaps later I will write up a guide to general things you should think about when creating a portfolio website.
