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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

#131

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…

If you like Flickr's new app, you may love FlickStackr.

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

#132
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Flickr you're still the product unfortunately, although Flickr is much better than other similar services in this regard. Do you really think your measly $25/year cover for their expenses with you? Seriously, if you don't want to be the product, organize those photos in a standard directory structure and synchronize it either with Dropbox or Google Drive or SkyDrive. The downside of doing that is that storage is…

"Do you really think your measly $25/year cover for their expenses with you?" Actually, yes. Hard drive space is incredibly cheap, especially at their scale. My photos aren't terribly popular, so they aren't using much bandwidth either. I probably cost them $5-10/year, tops. In fact, I'm probably one of the majority, the ones who subsidize the heavy, uber-popular users with tens of thousands of followers who upload h…

> Hard drive space is incredibly cheap

Actually, no it isn't and at scale it makes it even more expensive, because you need redundancy. We are talking about RAID and CDN, not to mention that at scale hardware breaks a lot more often.

What actually makes it palatable for businesses such as Yahoo or Google is that many people pay for this storage without using it, while heavy users that share a lot help by marketing the product through their sharing to others.

On the other hand I've got 50 GB worth of data uploaded on Flickr. You can't tell me that 50 GB of redundant on-demand storage is worth $25 / year, unless you live in some kind of fairy land. I also have only a couple of photos shared. So what value does Flickr get from me?

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

#133
So if I repurpose a photo I found on Instagram and it becomes the next Obama "Hope" poster I have to pay the photographer and Instagram? That would be lolled out of court.

Same thing with selling people's personal pics as stock photos, it doesn't matter what the user agreement says, that ain't gonna fly in front of a judge.

It would be like putting a sticker on the back of a picture frame that says whatever you put in here now belongs to Frames incorporated, NAL but it seems to me however legally binding it claims to be it wouldn't pass the smell test in court.

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

#134
post #110

There's an ethical and an unethical way to do this. Not being able to opt out, and changing the system wholesale overnight like this, is deeply unethical. On the scale of things they could do that would make this better: * Best case: opt-in only, compensate users whose photos they use. * Present a choice to users when they sign up, default to opt-out. * At least present a choice to existing users whether they want th…

It seems that you can opt out by selecting to be a "private" user.

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

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Flickr you're still the product unfortunately, although Flickr is much better than other similar services in this regard. Do you really think your measly $25/year cover for their expenses with you? Seriously, if you don't want to be the product, organize those photos in a standard directory structure and synchronize it either with Dropbox or Google Drive or SkyDrive. The downside of doing that is that storage is…

> With Flickr you're still the product unfortunately, although Flickr is much better than other similar services in this regard. Do you really think your measly $25/year cover for their expenses with you? Oh, absolutely. I store a backup copy of my entire Flickr library for something like $5/year on Amazon S3, and the service hasn't exactly had insane development costs the past few years - design and feature set have…

Fortunately for you, your collection is small. Because I love photography, but I'm a bad photographer, whenever I take my camera for a spin I always end up with 1000 photos in a couple of hours.

The result is something like 50 GB of photos, which isn't so cheap to backup on Amazon S3.

But on the other hand, we are talking about photos for which we need backups, because digital storage is incredibly unreliable and I want to show those photos to my grandchildren someday.

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

#138

So if I repurpose a photo I found on Instagram and it becomes the next Obama "Hope" poster I have to pay the photographer and Instagram? That would be lolled out of court. Same thing with selling people's personal pics as stock photos, it doesn't matter what the user agreement says, that ain't gonna fly in front of a judge. It would be like putting a sticker on the back of a picture frame that says whatever you put i…

In no case does this require you to pay the photographer and Instagram. It would be legally possible for you to pay the photographer or Instagram.

This change means that Instagram could license photos published through their service to you without compensating the photographer. You always have the option of licensing the photos directly from the photographer, in which case Instagram isn't involved at all.

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

#140

Question, with these new rules, can you still sell your pictures? Unless you live under a rock, you know that many "Instagram girls" sell their posts to clothing stores to promote them, it's actually hugely successful!

I've been living under a rock, then. Although, it's fairly ingenious.
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