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Maryland high school yearbook pulls photos from social networking site
Principal promises to include yearbook staff in journalism training
© 2007 Student Press Law Center
July 2, 2007
MARYLAND — With blank pages to fill and their deadline
looming, the yearbook editors at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Md.,
turned to the social networking site Facebook.com, publishing party photos and
candid snapshots that students had posted online — without credit or
permission.
When the yearbooks were distributed last month, students were
startled to see pictures they thought were theirs from a Web site they thought
was protected.
"You don’t expect to open the yearbook and see all
these pictures that you thought only you were looking at or a few of your
friends were looking at," said Susannah Green, a rising junior who was pictured
in the yearbook and wrote about the controversy for the student newspaper.
Green said she and her classmates expect that glimpses of their personal
lives shared in a semi-public Internet community should still be treated as
private.
"I think when people put their personal pictures on Facebook,
it’s a public site, but I don’t think they expect to see it in a
publication that everybody gets," Green said. "Also, you can make your Facebook
profile private and protected so only your friends can see it. So with that
degree of privacy in mind, people felt a little taken aback to see their
pictures there where anyone can see them."
Students trust Facebook's
privacy settings to restrict their pictures to a much more limited audience than
that of a widely distributed school publication. "People felt that their privacy
was being violated because they put pictures up on Facebook with the intent of
having them solely being viewed by a few friends," said Lindsay Deutsch, who
graduated in June and was co-editor of the school's student newspaper. "There's
a big difference between posting up photos for friends and having them being
archived in the history of Walter Johnson for anyone to see."
While
students objected to the pictures being taken from Facebook, they were less
troubled by the pictures themselves. No students or parents complained to the
principal, Christopher Garran.
The pictures showed students at parties
or dinners, "just hanging out," as Green described. "No one was doing anything
inappropriate," Garran said.
The only photograph that could have been
considered edgy, Garran said, pictured a group of students "tailgating," holding
red plastic cups. "They might not have wanted that in there," he acknowledged.
"But at the same time, I don’t know what's in those red cups. This was
ages ago, this wasn’t even at school. It's probably not the most
appropriate picture to be in the yearbook, but that’s the only
one."
Reproducing images posted on Facebook.com, or anywhere on the
Internet, without the owner's permission violates Facebook's terms of use and
could constitute copyright infringement, according to Adam Goldstein, an
attorney for the Student Press Law Center. A legal exception, called fair use,
is made when the image or the copyright owner of the image is the subject of
news or commentary, which was not the case in the yearbook, Goldstein
said.
But with no journalism training and the yearbook adviser out on
maternity leave, Goldstein said he would expect the student's conversance with
copyright law to be understandably slight.
"In the computer world, the
assumption tends to be, 'If it's possible, it's permissible.' If someone
hasn’t stopped me from taking and printing these pictures, then it must be
OK," Goldstein explained. "And that just isn't true. One of the first things
students learn when they study journalism is, of all the things you can do with
a pen, there are some you should and some you shouldn’t."
Garran
agreed that the issue could have been avoided had the students been better
informed.
"We probably could have done more in-house to educate students
about the use of these things," Garran said.
With his help, the students
developed a new procedure for tracking and crediting all photos. "We talked
about having a really clear system so that no photo goes in without a credit,
and the students seemed to think that was a good idea," Garran said.
He
also said he plans to expand the journalism education available to yearbook
staffers. "We sometimes have speakers come in and talk about journalistic ethics
with our student newspaper kids, who are really sort of on top of it, but we
don't really do that with our yearbook students," he said. "We'll definitely
open that up so that when people speak with our student newspaper kids,
they’ll also speak with our yearbook kids so that all our student
journalists get some of that education."
Garran said he sees education,
rather than discipline, as the way forward.
"With the photo credits and
with giving them the opportunity to sit in on some of the journalism stuff we do
with our newspaper kids, I think we'll address it," he said. "That’s more
of a constructive way, I think."
The principal also said he stands behind
the students and their yearbook.
"The kids did a fantastic job on that
yearbook. In my opinion, it’s a great publication," he said. "They're good
kids, they just made a judgment call on doing some things — probably some
stuff they shouldn't have done, but I think they've learned from it."
"We're going to continue to have student editors. It's still a student
publication," Garran vowed. "There are some people who think I should step in a
take over, and that's just not going to happen. I'm in the education business.
I'm not in the punishment business."
By Isaac Arnsdorf, SPLC staff writer
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