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Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

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Re: Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

#71
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you are correct. The old TOS did not allow them to resell your pics. Also note they are saying your private pics will now be fair game as well. You are correct that the old TOS seems pretty standard, but these changes are not trivial.

This is exactly why TOS should show a diff or revision history. Failing that, there really ought to be an external website documenting changes.

Find the old text somewhere. Get the new text. Copypaste both in a text file. Then use diff or meld or another difftool of your choice to compare the two text files.

Re: Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

#72
The new flickr app (albeit very late) looks a whole lot better proposition then Instagram.

To value Instagram at a billion dollars (well less now I guess because of Facebook's share price) is insane. They have a serious problem with spam - every photo I upload is liked by many getM0refollowers and every photo I upload is bombarded with spam comments. They seem incapable of getting a grip on this problem.

The app also has bugs e.g. it says I have X followed but then displays X minus Y when I try to view who they are.

Its popular photos are rubbish - so there is no way to discover interesting photos other than searching for tags you're interested in. Photos with a 1000 likes appeal to the teenage market only i.e. they're not serious photos.

When you follow someone you get very large photos dominating your stream, so I don't follow many people because of this.

I really hope flickr aggresively try and take back this market. Instagram is a neat idea, but has very poor execution.

Re: Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

#73

deleting your account is futile, photographs will still remain on their AWS account. after deleting one of my accounts, I was suspicious that they would still keep the photographs. So to test this, I made a dummy account named after where i live; nikkojapan http://instagram.com/nikkojapan/ i made a quick pointless photograph just to upload http://instagram.com/p/K8bx_ZB59K/ Here is the link that still exists to the p…

Deleting the photos doesn't work even?

Re: Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

#74
post #30
post #4

I'm starting to realize that Instagram is not the service I thought it was. I initially thought it was Flickr with social features, but more and more it's turning into Facebook with photos. There is zero content discoveries features, so you have no way to get new followers or find new people to follow. And the top posters are all teenage pop stars that I've never even heard about who post completely uninteresting pho…

I've always had issues with certain details on Flickr (perhaps since the Yahoo acquisition; I honestly can't remember what was just carried over) such as the inability to download all your photos at once for backup, lockout of your own photos when your pro membership expires (combined with the aforementioned non-feature), and some other things. But as far as I can tell, the community is definitely there. Whenever I a…

Flickr never locks you out of access to your photos, per se.

The only difference is that your photostream is limited to 200 photos. Every other way that photos are accessed continues to work - whether you've embedded them on blogs, other people favorited them, etc.

There are 3rd party tools to export your photos from Flickr via the API. Flickr hasn't written their own exporter (they probably should) but exporting apps aren't blocked.

Re: Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

#75

The new flickr app (albeit very late) looks a whole lot better proposition then Instagram. To value Instagram at a billion dollars (well less now I guess because of Facebook's share price) is insane. They have a serious problem with spam - every photo I upload is liked by many getM0refollowers and every photo I upload is bombarded with spam comments. They seem incapable of getting a grip on this problem. The app also…

I don't really know what Instagram is really worth, but it might have been worth a billion dollars to Facebook to keep Instagram away from Twitter. Twitter + Instagram is starting to look like a viable Facebook competitor.

Although we know now that Twitter is choosing to become a walled garden with a very limited kind of service, a year ago it seemed possible for them to become a sort of internet infrastructure.

Re: Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

#77

Wow. Wonder if their users will be bothered to care

I wouldn't much care about my Facebook statuses somehow being used as advertising, or even my tweets for that matter. They're just things I've said publicly and social networks have trained me not to expect any control over them anymore. On the other hand, photos are much more personal: they're works of art, at their own level. So I think whether you care or not depends not only on your stance regarding privacy and a…

> social networks have trained me not to expect any control over them anymore

I think this is the major issue that will define the internet landscape in the long term. People indeed got trained not to care about privacy and just like with "war on terror", they gradually give up their rights and freedom for the sake of "security" and "better user experience".

Soon enough anyone who speaks out of user rights or privacy will be seen as a mad man akin to RMS these days. 10 years back, a site, which required a scan of your government issued ID in order to change your name would be deemed insane. Now it's a common practice.

Welcome to the Matrix, gentlemen.

Re: Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

#79
post #43

This is not new. It seems that their new TOS explicitly lays out that your photos may be used in advertising, possibly due to a new law somewhere requiring specific notification and release, but my understanding is that you'd already given them this right based on this clause: By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the Instagram Services, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully…

Agreed with aptwebapps. The old TOU, as you correctly say, is pretty standard. Twitter's is similar, and any company with decent lawyers is going to protect themselves with similar wording. The new TOU, however, heads in a different direction. The phrase "limited license" is gone. It's been replaced with the phrase "transferable, sub-licensable" license. Also new is "a business or other entity may pay us to display y…

It really doesn't seem like a material change to me. Again, IANAL, so if there is some reason to believe these things would be disallowed under the old TOS, I'd like to know, but it sounds fairly straightforward. While Instagram may have had a more difficult case under the old TOS, and may have had to be more careful about the dispensation rather than just doing a blatant "stock photo"-type interface, I could definitely see an attempt at the argument that representation in "any media formats through any media channels" covers Instagram in most cases of what would be considered "transferred sub-licensing".

The clarifications, of course, are intended to clarify the consent they're taking. I'd be interested to know their motives for this; as I speculated in the parent, does a new law take effect in an important market with regard to advertising? Are they just trying to play it safe? Are they going to make aggressive moves into this kind of space (reselling user photos, using users' profiles without consent in advertisements) and wanted to ensure that they didn't have to deal with any lawsuits upon launch?

I will agree that the new TOS allows them to use your profile and likeness as they see fit, which based on my simple layman's reading, isn't included in the old TOS.

Just thinking out loud here, move along.

Re: Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

#80
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet celebrities will care when their picture unknowingly appears in some ad.

UIAM you can't publish an advertisement with someone in it until they sign a model release form.

In the UK I think the person has to be "featured", ie a central focus(?), to require a model release - based on the ECHR right to a private life for example; exclusions apply for news reporting it seems.

http://www.apug.org/forums/forum137/82809-legalities-relatin...

After 20 minutes of searching with Google and reading on about 10 websites I couldn't find any photog sites that even reference the law ...

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