UPDATE: Wendy Schollum: Twitpic now claims copyright on your images

POSTSCRIPT: Twitpic apologises for terms of service "confusion": http://blog.twitpic.com/
 
In the past, Facebook has been taken to task by their users for changing privacy settings and terms of use without giving users enough notification.  And while the social networking site has now made moves to amend its ways, other social media sites and applications are continuing to prey on its user's predisposition to click the "accept" button on updated terms and conditions, before reading the finer detail - the latest offender being a widely used website called Twitpic. 
Twitpic is one of several services that allows Twitter users to upload photos to its website, making it easy to share links to photos in their Twitter posts.  But, on May 10th Twitpic made a small, but significant change to its terms of service which means that they are now claiming copyright on all images uploaded to their service.
The terms of service changes that most impact Twitpic users are: "...you hereby grant Twitpic a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of..." and "...after you remove or delete your media from the Service provided that any sub-license by Twitpic to use, reproduce or distribute the Content prior to such termination may be perpetual and irrevocable."
So what does this mean?  Well, without falsely claiming that I have legal expertise, I interpret this as meaning:  Twitpic reserves the right to utilise their users images (at no cost) in any way they want - including selling them, transferring their license to third parties and "prepare derivative works of", which suggests that they reserve the right to remove any watermarks, etc from images that they may wish to use.
The second excerpt from their terms of service implies that they retain rights to images (in the event that they already have a sublicense in place) even if a Twitpic user deletes their images from the service (perhaps with the desire of retaining the copyright of such images?).
Consider for a moment how you would feel if you found a picture of your child being used to advertise a product or service, without your consent.  Or how about finding that a photo you took of a natural disaster had been sold to news services, without you seeing a cent.  And how about seeing a photo of your husband or wife being used to advertise an unsavory website?  If you're a Twitpic user, you are now at risk of finding yourself in one of these unpleasant situations.
With Twitpic being used as a default image handling service for many Twitter related applications (such as TweetDeck, etc), it is important that Twitter users take the time to investigate what image handling service they are currently using and, if they discover it is Twitpic, consider deleting any existing images uploaded to this service and changing their provider.
To find out if Twitpic is linked to your Twitter account: login to Twitter, go to the "Settings" area, click the "Applications" tab and scroll through the list of applications linked to your account.  To remove any application, simply click the "revoke access" button next to it.  But, remember, to remove any existing images from Twitpic you will need to login to www.twitpic.com and manually delete each image, before revoking its access to your Twitter account.
Wendy Schollum is a web strategist and Managing Director of Xplore.net Online Solutions.  If you would like more information on web marketing and social media, follow the Xplore.net  team on Twitter (www.twitter.com/XploreNET), connect on Facebook (www.facebook.com/XploreNET) or call the friendly Xplore.net team on 0800 100 900.