Mr. Peter Feeney:

Senator Craughwell raises very important questions. Social media have argued since the beginning that they are not publishers; they simply facilitate. What they are doing is providing links to other sources who should be responsible for the content. That fig leaf of an argument has been used by social media companies for years, since the very beginning, that they do not publish anything, they just draw our attention to something somebody else has published. The truth is that now it is seen to be just a legal fig leaf and that social media companies have to accept responsibility for what goes up on their platforms, and they have to be liable for it. Otherwise, they can be as irresponsible as they want to be. The era in which social media get away with saying that they are not publishers and that they simply provide information and access to other people is largely over.

Senator Craughwell raises a terribly important point regarding copyright. It is not part of the Press Ombudsman's remit. We do not have to deal with copyright issues, but he raises an important point, which is that people put material up on Facebook and all the other platforms and we think that once it is up there we can use it wherever we like. We think that we can take it, copy it and reuse it, but copyright remains with someone else. If you put something up on Facebook and you do not impose any restrictions on other people accessing it, it is quite difficult to justify other people not taking that image, but there is a lack of understanding that material that is available on Facebook can be used by anybody else in any context they like. I fully sympathise with Senator Craughwell's constituent who put up a photograph and then got a demand for €5,000. It was probably the first photograph she saw that looked nice. If you go to Google and put in Gougane Barra, you will get hundreds of nice photographs of Gougane Barra. Google will say underneath the photos who owns the copyright. If it is Bord Fáilte or Cork County Council, you can be pretty certain that it is freely available to use by others, but all it requires is a phone call or an email to find out if that is the case.

I will give a very simple example. We appointed a new chairman of the Press Council last week because our outgoing chairman had reached the end of his term. One of the newspapers came back to me and said they were looking for a photograph of him. We had not taken any photograph because he had only been appointed that day, so I went to Google and got lots of photographs of him. I saw one there which said the copyright was owned by Queen's University Belfast, because he is a visiting professor in Belfast. I got in touch with the communications people in Queen's and asked if I had permission to use the photograph and they said it was free to use in any context people liked. We were quite comfortable in using that photograph. I could have taken another photograph that belonged to a photographic agency, and it would have retained copyright of it. I would have taken the risk then of being liable, but the public do not understand that. They think anything that is available on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or wherever else can be used in any context they like. It is a real danger, and it can be very frightening if you get a demand for €5,000 for using a photograph.