When Stephanie Gordon tweeted two amazing photos and short video of the Space Shuttle from her Delta flight yesterday, she had no idea what would happen next. “It’s all over the place! Never expected this when I tweeted the photo!” she tweets now, 24 hours after her photo, as she gets ready to appear on msnbc TV.
The photo may be one of the most-viewed “citizen journalist” photos in recent memory. The best Twitpic, shot with her iPhone, has been viewed 350,000 times, but that’s just the beginning. Her video aired on all the networks and her photos appeared on the home pages of news sites (like msnbc.com), spread like wildfire on Tumblr and appeared on page A1 of the St. Petersburg Times.
Not long after she tweeted the images, media organizations began peppering her with requests to use the photos. With each request, she gave the nod, asking that media orgs DM her with the article. For one, she responded, “If it’s going to be in print I would like to be compensated.” After seeing her video on ABC News, she tweeted, “My photo was used but not credited on abc news. Not cool.”
In the end, it’s unclear how many news organizations and blog posts used her photo with and without permission and credit. (We asked but did not hear back, hence the Twitter screen grab approach above.) To complicate matters, photo services like Twitpic have their own terms of service — Twitpic updated their TOS twice in the last week, prompting a blog post from founder Noah Everett to clarify matters.
“You the user retain all copyrights to your photos and videos,” he said, but adding that Twitpic has partnered with organizations to help track down Twitpics that were used without permission. Everett said the move was in response to that Twitpic last month of a hole in the ceiling of a Southwest flight. “Many commercial entities took the image from Twitpic and used it without the user’s permission,” he said.
As more people capture amazing events with their phones in the months and years to come, this will be an interesting space to watch.