I am no lawyer, so take my comments as you will....
These terms are pretty standard for social media entities. For twitter in particular, it also states right at the top of their terms of service "
You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. What’s yours is yours — you own your Content (and your photos and videos are part of the Content)." They ask for the rights to reproduce etc etc because tweets show up everywhere. Twitter's API allows you to embed tweets in a web site, and twitter needs permission for that. Also, have you ever watched a TV show and they show tweets on screen? Again, twitter needs the rights to reproduce your tweets. They're not selling your pics. They are granting themselves the right to monetise your content by showing ads to the people who view your tweets. It's my understanding that this is pretty much boilerplate legal speak for social media sites, but again IANAL.
For those unaware, I run the Guild's twitter account, and it's my understanding that I can tweet anything that gets upload here. It's in the Guild's terms of service: "
Any contributions to this site are assumed to be the property of the poster and may not be used without permission, except for use by The Operators for promotion of the Website." That bit about promotion of the website allows us to reuse the content on the Guild's social media accounts. Now we obviously don't want to make anyone unhappy, but if these terms of service are not to your liking, you're going to have to raise the issue with Robbie. (This is above my pay grade!) For what it's worth, I get tweets & direct messages from people on a semi-regular basis saying (to paraphrase) "I love your stuff, can you make me a map?" I direct these people to the Mapmaking Requests forum and they can deal with the artists direct there. Raising the profile of the Guild benefits everyone, I feel. More eyeballs on our stuff = more members and a new influx of talent, and more commissions (for those who take them) from authors/gamemakers etc who may never have encountered the site before. I should state also that I don't generally tweet the full size images you post (unless they're small to start with). They're shrunk down, quite significantly sometimes, so it's not your original hi-res pic that's shared.
If people aren't happy with Guild posting their stuff to FB and Twitter, then I guess we need to have a conversation about that, because right now J.Edward and I work on the understanding that we can share whatever we choose, and the site's TOS validate our actions. It's my opinion that it's not the Guild's social media sites that are causing the issue with people's maps showing up everywhere. The people who are sharing without permission are coming direct to the Guild and taking the pics from source. Unfortunately, whether you like it or not, once your art's posted in a public forum, you can wave bye-bye to control over it. It's simply the nature of the internet. What you
can do is watermark your images. Redrobes has got
a nice script to help with that. For many, the lack of credit is the issue, not the sharing, so it's wise to do what you can to protect your images.