Social Media and Copyright

Created works are subject by law to copyright and sharing content or material via social media is no exception to this rule.

As a general guide and simply put if you are the creator or author of the material including original comments, stories or information, images and video's then you own the copyright and you are free to use the material however you wish.  Other people must ask your permission to use the material.

However if you are wanting to use or post material created by other people or organisations then you must seek permission from the creator before publishing it.  Generally there are three exceptions to this and they are (University of Melbourne, 2012):

1. Copyright in the work has expired – generally 70 years after the death of the creator depending on the type of work and if or when it was published 
2. You are using an insubstantial portion – you can quote a few lines or paragraphs of text from a book or journal article, but it is more difficult if you wish to use a portion of a film, image or song. For these, you need to consider how key, essential, important and distinct to the overall work, the portion you wish to use is. As this is qualitative, rather than quantitative, even a really short extract may be considered substantial if it is distinctive or a key part of the overall work. For example, a short scene in a movie that reveals a key plot point or a few bars from a song if they form a distinctive part of the melody will probably be deemed substantial
3. The copyright owner has given their permission or licensed the work - for example Creative Commons material. 

There are also exceptions such as Twitter and Facebook where you can re-tweet or reuse material within those social media tools, but outside of that you need to seek permission from the creator (University of Melbourne, 2012).

Sharing or embedding links to a website is a great feature, but not always copyright-free and material is often made available without permission, so the University Of Melbourne (2012) suggest using the following steps in deciding if material is legitimate:

• Link to websites that are reputable, legitimate and/or official. Take care with user generated sites, such as Youtube, as not all users understand copyright and ensure that the material they contribute is copyright compliant
• Check that the content and the website have proper attributions and includes a copyright statement.  The more detailed the copyright information, the more likely that the website is copyright compliant
• Check the quality of the content. Poor quality sound and images may indicate that the material has been reproduced without permission
• If it’s too good to be true, it probably is. Use your common sense and judgement, if you find a website with the latest Hollywood blockbuster available in full, chances are it’s not legal.   

For further information regarding copyright and uploading material to social media follow the links below:

Online social networking: copyright
Complying with copyright when using social media

References

University of Melbourne. (November, 2012). Social media & copyright. 
    Retrieved September 17, 2014, from website: http://www.unimelb.edu.au/copyright/information/guides/socialmedialibrarystaff.pdf