"How my photo totally escaped me on the Internet": here is the title of the survey conducted by Vincent Glad on his blog "the year 2000" hosted on the site of Liberation . Through a Kafkaesque narrative, the journalist who is ultra-specialized in new information technologies tells how he once discovered that his "free of rights" portrait, used to illustrate his "Wikipedia" page, had been diverted to different sites, up to "Reductress" an ersatz of the Gorafi, feminist and American version.

Photos instagram: A question of licenses

How? The question of the use of the image on the Internet is complex and still very vague. For the case of Vincent Glad, his photo taken by a professional in the context of a Wikipedia operation, was posted under the "Creative Commons" license, or free if the name of the photographer is mentioned. Is. As a result, the right concerning these images posted on the Internet would concern only the author and not the subject taken in photograph. So if the author decides that your face can be reused for all kinds of ads in any country, you might end up like Vincent Glad to praise the merits of a real estate ebook on an Australian site or in Budapest.

Photos instagram: And on social networks?

The adventure told by this journalist is rather wacky and even amusing but it leads us to wonder what happens to our photos posted on the web and even more particularly on social networks, these platforms on which we share almost daily images of us or our loved ones. If we look at the conditions of use of large networks such as Facebook or Instagram, we note that again the conditions of diffusion of the images remain blurred. "For content protected by intellectual property rights, such as photos or videos (IP), ... you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sublicensable, royalty-free license for the use of content that you publish on or in relation to Facebook, "reads the terms of use of Facebook. Not really reassuring.

The solutions ?

Solutions certainly exist, even if they are not 100% reliable. Plugins can block the "save" function on images and other "technical" options prevent Google from indexing your images. Others try to protect their photos with copyright directly integrate in the image, but in reality, there too is not a genuine legal defense. And then the person who posts the photo on the Internet is often different from the one who took it and even more from the one who is on the said picture. An endless imbroglio! However, the future of the web should go through a genuine legislative approach to this issue. For the time being, we must simply remain vigilant.