Who Owns Photos Distributed Via Twitter?

According to Twitters new terms of service, the photographer distributing her content does. Easy enough, right? Not so, says the Agence France-Presse.

According to paidcontent, “a lawsuit over photos of the Haiti earthquake may prove to be an early test of what kind of rights users of Twitter and related services retain to their content.” The Agence France-Presse wire service (“AFP”) has insisted that it has the rights to use a photographers images of the Haiti earthquake without the photographer’s approval, simply because the photographer used TwitPic and Twitter to promote and sell his work. AFP argues that Twitter’s terms of service allow third parties broad re-use rights to their content, and thus the photographer’s selection of this mode of digital distribution gave AFP a broad license to redistribute the photographer’s images without consent from the photographer.

Is this possible? Can anyone grab images you’ve uploaded elsewhere and made available via hyperlink through Twitter or any other tweet source? I don’t think so, and neither does Venkat Balasubramani over at Eric Goldman’s blog. But certainly a major case for photographers.