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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

#171

Post by 54mf »

bad_user wrote: post #132
54mf wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 th…

50GB? Are you sure? That's over 1700 full-resolution RAW images. (Roughly-estimated at 30MB each.)

Even if that is the case, you're welcome! I'm subsidizing your account. :)

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

#172

Post by 54mf »

benbataille wrote: post #151
bad_user wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

>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. That's related to reliability not scaling per see. Building a highly reliable system is far cheaper when you reach the scale of Google or Amazon because you can rationalize purchase. Actually, I bet price of hardware can tot…

And that's assuming every user has 50GB worth of photos - which, for the record, is a lot of photos. Most are probably in the low hundreds-of-MB range, which brings your cost per user down by an order of magnitude, at least.

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

#173

Post by 54mf »

spacestation wrote: post #59

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…

This is actually kind of a big deal. Have you sent this info to any tech blogs?

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

#174

Post by mleeds »

The hardest thing about legalese: trying to convey intent and write something specific at the same time. The intent may be in the category of “don’t be evil”, but the user never knows. And while it is easy to say “well, just stop using the service”, the impact of networks is that it makes it less realistic to use another service. Just another signal that we live in a “Caveat User” world…

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

#175

Post by jamesbritt »

mcherm wrote: post #113
cookiecaper wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I'm aware "that changed". I'm not sure that "an entity that wasn't Instagram, say a nightclub, couldn't use your pictures on their own promotional materials, advetising, or site without obtaining a separate license from you" is really true, though. If a night club was working in clear collaboration with Instagram and published your photos on its promotional materials, that would seem to be covered by Instagram…

There is a difference between a contract that "Joe can use this" and one that says "Joe can let anyone use it". Sure, if Mary uses it Joe can say "She's just using it for me", but UNLIKE code, the law is not completely decimated by a single loophole. Judges and juries can see through blatant abuses and rule that the contract did not cover that use. ("Can", not "will", but even the chance is enough: a 1% chance of los…

Judges and juries can see through blatant abuses and rule that the contract did not cover that use.

I've seen this observation mentioned a few times on HN and it seems quite right. The letter of the law may say this or that, but ultimately it comes down to some form of the giggle test. You have to imagine a judge saying, "You didn't really think that's what the law|contract meant, did you?"

For example, people trying to avoid penalties for unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material by claiming they own the copyright on certain large integers or are merely passing _numbers_ around, not movies or songs.

With the boilerplate TOS there may be all sorts of things that one could imagine are allowed but I'm pretty sure Instagram's (i.e. Facebook's) lawyers thought that the original phrasing would not be sufficient to clearly allow them to do what they wanted to do, so it was changed.

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

#177

Post by FireBeyond »

jakeonthemove wrote: post #119

I doubt this policy is going to last long - the biggest and most important Instagram users as far as I can tell are celebrities (incl. professionals and other popular persons), and they sure as hell will do something if Instagram starts selling/licensing the photos to anyone who wants them. Coupled with the other big mistake of separating themselves from Twitter, I'd say Instagram is well on their way of becoming the…

I'd suspect that on the flip side, if Instagram does intend to do this sort of thing, they will have a well-curated list of "who not to piss off".

That being said, said celebrities, professionals and popular persons also agreed to the same TOS...

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

#179

Post by majorlazer »

bad_user wrote: post #126
untog wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside of doing that is that storage is more expensive No, the downside is that there are zero social features when you put your photos on Dropbox. Flickr is better, but still not anywhere near Instagram.

What's the problem with sharing from Dropbox instead of Instagram and how's that any different?

Are you serious? Why don't you just get some cheap hosting plan and link directly to the images from there? Hell, why not setup a home server and share from there, it will be free!

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

#180

Post by lotso »

jonknee wrote: post #167
untog wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you figure that G+ has a larger audience? Larger potential audience, sure, given the number of Google users out there. But Instagram posts have engagement (likes and comments) on a level I've never seen on Google+.

G+ has more active users than Instagram based on the released data. They purposefully don't release too much information, but the figures that have been announced show G+ to be far larger than Instagram. Instagram claims more than 100M signups, Google claims more than 500M. I don't see MAU for Instagram, but Google+'s MAU is 135M which is more than all of Instagram's signups. Like any social network, what you see is…

What makes a user "active" on G+ exactly?
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