Keeping Your Visual Content in Check.
Manage your visual content effectively. Now more than ever, it’s essential to consider how you handle photos for your school and community. This management directly relates to your policies on data security, privacy, publicity, and content ownership.
Throughout the school year, staff, students, and families take thousands of photos that document the school experience and student learning both inside and outside the classroom. These photos tell your school stories and are meant to be shared.
To ensure everyone benefits from this content, consider the rights of your community when managing photos respectfully and responsibly. If you’re interested in crowdsourcing photos, check this article.
What is Copyright?
To manage your visual content effectively, it is essential to understand that people generally regard photographs as artistic work. Consequently, copyright protects these images from the moment of capture. Importantly, the photographer, not the subject, owns the copyright. Furthermore, copyright allows us to give proper credit for the work. This protection falls under intellectual property laws, such as the Canada Copyright Act and the US Copyright Law. Ultimately, understanding these rules empowers you to protect and respect creative content.
In Vidigami, the uploader of an image is attributed ownership of the media and has the right to receive credit for it.
Uploaders can:
- Add their name to the media as “Creator”.
- Add their name in the Copyright field so it can be affixed to the image.
- Prevent the image from being downloaded or replicated by adding a watermark.
Each school can tailor this approach to fit their students, staff, and families, thereby ensuring control over their visual content
What are the Privacy Rights?
Governments around the world have increasingly adopted data privacy legislation since the European Union’s General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) came into effect in 2018. Specifically, data privacy law highlights photos as sensitive personal data or personally identifiable information (PII). As a result, users must securely protect their photos and retain the right to give and revoke consent regarding access to their personal information.
In this context, Vidigami allows every user to give and withhold consent for any shared photo. Moreover, users can opt out, ensuring that any tagged photo is automatically unshared. Additionally, they may flag a photo as a “bad picture” or restrict consent to prevent their images from being used on social media.
What are Public Rights?
Publicity rights govern how an image is used for marketing or commercial purposes. Consequently, a person violates their right of publicity when someone uses their image for commercial purposes without permission. For instance, a school must therefore obtain explicit consent from a student and their family before using the student’s photo in an advertisement for the school. By following these guidelines, schools can respect individuals’ rights while promoting their activities effectively.
- With Vidigami, every user manages their own consent.
- The community grants no publicity rights to its members.
- A notice appears when a user downloads a photo, reminding them that the image is for personal use only and should not be shared publicly.
- Each user receives consent permissions that highlight and enforce any use restrictions.
- A school can set consent levels to ensure users have given permission.
- By default, all users have a consent level of “unrestricted” when added to Vidigami.
- Parents can request a more restrictive consent level for their children.
