11–20 of 258 posts
Kevin Systrom is the man. To be acquired, be part of a public company and still respond quickly, succinctly and effectively their monetization plan is something a lot of companies can learn from.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/disruptions-instagr...
They want to use your pictures to sell products to your friends. Say you take a picture of your friends at Domino's Pizza. They can show that picture to your friends and say "Look this guy who you know loves our pizza. Come try it out." Now you may not mind making an endorsement. But with this plan they don't have to ask you for permission. They can just do it. And if you turn out to be a hit they can use it to sell…
But what's to stop them from your "implicit" endorsements of products/services you use from location data or with machine vision (something Google can already do with many logos in Street View imagery, I've discovered in my reporting)? Oh, that's right. Nothing. Which is why they don't want to have to ask for permission to do these things.
As a non lawyer who likes to pretend he knows what he's talking about, I say: "Lovely, now let's get that in writing."
They were granting themselves irrevokable rights to do things people didn't ever want them to be able to do.
They want to use your pictures to sell products to your friends. Say you take a picture of your friends at Domino's Pizza. They can show that picture to your friends and say "Look this guy who you know loves our pizza. Come try it out." Now you may not mind making an endorsement. But with this plan they don't have to ask you for permission. They can just do it. And if you turn out to be a hit they can use it to sell…
They actually can't. There's a world of difference between using a photo to depict an event, and using a photo to endorse.
"Domino's is featuring $5 large pizzas, here's your friend Bob at Domino's last week!" is legal.
"Look at Bob who loves our pizza, come try it out!" is not, unless Bob has signed off on it. You've crossed the line into commercial endorsement, which is a civil suit waiting to happen.
Now, there could potentially be an argument that depicting Bob at Domino's next to a paid message by Domino's is implied endorsement - that's something Instagram will have to figure out. IANAL, though I have studied commercial vs. editorial usage of photography reasonably deeply.
Using someone to endorse a product is a legally non-trivial proposition. It's not as simple as "we can use your photo here".
This is a completely different style of incident response than parent company Facebook's. I much prefer this (relatively) straight up approach, although I'll admit it's more likely to come back and bite them in the arse a few years down the line.
Hopefully the take-away is an explanation would have been helpful when the ToS was changed. Everyone was given limited information and they interpreted it how they could. Maybe sites will think about this next time they quietly changed their ToS.
It's little comfort for a company to say "oh the contract says X, but don't worry it's not true".
The take-away here is to actually properly review the ToS in light of "how might a user interpret this" not in "how can we make sure we have the absolute most coverage on our side".
As a non lawyer who likes to pretend he knows what he's talking about, I say: "Lovely, now let's get that in writing."
Interesting use of the present tense in the second sentence, in an "I am not having an affair with that woman" sort of way.
My account is now gone, same with atleast a dozen people I've talked to in the last day or so. I'd hazard a guess the quick response has been in response to sudden surge in accounts deleted.