Twitter on photo ownership: “What’s yours is yours. Twitter’s rules, not Photobucket’s”

With today’s announcement that Twitter has partnered with Photobucket in order to provide a native photo hosting option, the first question out of our mouth was obvious — Who owns the content?

In an interview with Photobucket CEO Tom Munro, TNW’s Courtney Boyd Myers asked the question directly:

CBM: How will the integration work?

TM: The images will be owned by Twitter.

Obviously this didn’t sit very well with users, and it didn’t sit well with us either. But Twitter’s Sean Garrett had another opinion:

It’s a small, but powerful statement. Especially more powerful when you look at the recent debacle concerning photo sharing sites which we covered in depth here. In short, nearly every site on the Internet claims ownership of and the ability to profit from your uploaded content.

So there you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak. Unless Twitter changes its rules, your content is your own, and it appears that we’ll be playing safely for some time to come.