Publishing images on the Internet

For many young people, publishing pictures and videos on the Internet is an important part of Internet use. Publication presents an opportunity to share aspects of your life and present your creative skills in photography and image processing. As a young person publishes images or other content, he or she assumes another role as an author rather than a spectator, or a producer instead of a consumer. On the Internet, this is easy: there are numerous arenas for publishing content either for the use of a small in-crowd or for all the world to see. Typically, images and videos are distributed through social media services, such as the IRC Gallery and other similar image gallery pages such as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr.

However, whenever images or videos are published, you need to consider important issues relating to copyright and the protection of your own and other peoples’ privacy. Below is a list of questions which will help you discuss image publishing with your students, and possibly even make you reconsider some of your own Internet publishing practices.

Things to think about when publishing images on the net:

- Is the picture yours? Copyright is also valid on the internet, and image copyright belongs to the person who took the picture. If you publish pictures that are taken by others, you must request their permission.
- Are there other people in the picture? You have to request their permission for publishing the picture. If there are minors, i.e. under 18-year-olds in the picture, permission should also be requested from their parents.
- What impression does the image convey of you? A horrible grin, a cigarette in your mouth or a daring pose may seem like a good idea at the time of publishing, but how will you feel about it later on? If you don't feel that you would show the picture to your parents, think again before you publish it.
- What kind of impression is conveyed of others? Take special care never to publish pictures that will make the people portrayed in them feel uncomfortable. Publishing a picture that hurts someone’s feelings can be interpreted as bullying or even slander.
- Some images on the net are available for your own use (though not to be used in school assignments etc). Remember this when publishing pictures: how would you feel if someone downloaded a picture, which you had published, onto their own computer?
- Once an image is published, it can never be removed from the Internet. Pictures you have removed from your profile may be available elsewhere on the Internet, for example on pages where obsolete web pages are stored. Maybe someone else has copied it onto his or her own computer, and now intends to publish it again on the Internet.

You can also make Internet publication issues more concrete for your students by going through the ‘Exercise in Image Analysis.

More information is available on (for example) these pages:

‘Good to know’ brochure of the Data Protection Ombudsman (in Finnish)
Website for youth by the Mannerheim League for Child Welfare (in Finnish)
www.tekijanoikeus.fi (in Finnish)