And we have always been at war with Eastasia.
Instagram's official response
191–200 of 258 posts
Re: Instagram's official response
#192I don't trust the legal opinions from the sales and marketing people. I'll read the ToS myself.
Re: Instagram's official response
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's another take that disagrees with their blog post -- and this one is from an actual practicing intellectual property attorney: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57559859-38/instagram-riva... "That effectively guts the user's control over the use and exploitation of the photo," says Daniel Schaeffer, an attorney with Neal & McDevitt, a boutique law firm in Northfield, Ill., specializing in intellectual property.…
> Here's another take that disagrees with their blog post -- and this one is from an actual practicing intellectual property attorney FWIW, the author of the Verge post I linked, managing editor Nilay Patel, also holds a law degree, and previously worked as a copyright attorney.
If he was such a great lawyer, why is he now in publishing? I would take the word of a practicing lawyer over one who has left the field.
Re: Instagram's official response
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think users feel that way. What they want is to be acknowledged and respected for helping build the server to what it is today. No users = no service. Don't sell us out just because you chose to take money and sell for a cool bil.
The users didn't help build anything. Instagram built a cool service, and the users used it. They didn't build anything. Now obviously network effects help something like this grow, but don't kid yourself. They aren't running a charity. They are running a business. At some point you have to start making money or the service just goes away. Then all that those amazing users "built" will be gone in a second when they f…
And users will move on to something else. Product/Customer is a mutual thing.
Re: Instagram's official response
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
The terms are deliberately foggy in a way to protect Instagram. They used a good lawyer. The product manager failed here, not the lawyers.
Such a dated definition of a good lawyer! If a lawyer's advice pisses off your users, that isn't a good lawyer. Sure a lawyer can claim that being "conservative" on behalf of their "client's interests" is the best way to act. That's no longer credible though. The client (Instagram's) interests can be more closely linked now to their user's interests, than was the case before the Internet when a company could write wh…
> If a lawyer's advice pisses off your users, that isn't a good lawyer.
Sorry, but under universally-accepted legal ethics standards going back centuries, that's not at all how it works.
Lawyers advise, as you say, but ultimately, the client's business people make the call. Sometimes a lawyer will tell a client, "sure, legally you can do this, but you need to be prepared for some significant blow-back," and then the business people decide they'll take that risk. That decision is entirely within the province of the business people; not only can the lawyer do nothing about it, she must remain silent to the outside world about it except in extremely-narrow circumstances.
Few would have it otherwise. Even when we're talking about a public company, few shareholders, let alone managers, would want the company's lawyers --- who typically have never had much first-hand business experience, let alone P&L responsibility --- to be able to overrule a decision by the business people about business issues.
Re: Instagram's official response
#196I find this thread really fascinating. I have a hard time imagining a more better apology from Instagram. They accept responsibility, there isn't a trace of hostility towards any of the people who 'misinterpreted' their terms, they are upfront about needing to make money, and they communicate (or attempt to) that they were never in favor of any of those kind of downright villainous things it seemed like they were in…
The thing is, most apologies contain the word "sorry." By contrast, this one acknowledges that "[l]egal documents are easy to misinterpret" and that they don't blame us for interpreting "you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your ... photos ... without any compensation to you" as what it sounds like.
Re: Instagram's official response
#197There's something I can't quite put my finger on, that makes this response seem a bit forced and insincere. "Legal documents are easy to misinterpret. So I’d like to address specific concerns we’ve heard from everyone" My understanding is that legal documents are written precisely to be as hard to misinterpret as possible. They say exactly what they mean, and (subject to possible judicial interpretation) mean exactly…
>My understanding is that legal documents are written precisely to be as hard to misinterpret as possible. In this case, the issue is that legal documents are written to be as cover-your-ass as possible. Instagram needs a license for your content to show it on their site. Then a lawyer says "what if Facebook sells Instagram to someone else?". So they add a bit that makes it a transferable license. That was easy! But…
It is the responsibility of someone in the company (not necessarily a lawyer) to think about how those legalistic terms would look before they were unleashed on the public. The company is now big enough to know better. The changes to the TOS that are promised in the blog post should have been made up front, not in response to a PR disaster.
Re: Instagram's official response
#198I find this thread really fascinating. I have a hard time imagining a more better apology from Instagram. They accept responsibility, there isn't a trace of hostility towards any of the people who 'misinterpreted' their terms, they are upfront about needing to make money, and they communicate (or attempt to) that they were never in favor of any of those kind of downright villainous things it seemed like they were in…
>I have a hard time imagining a more better apology from Instagram.
I don't. This message from on high wasn't particularly bad for a startup, but there are plenty of internet "lifestyle businesses" that can communicate with their user base much much better. The guys who accidentally turn their hobby projects into a small, sustainable business for themselves talk to their userbase with a level of candidness that you'll never see from startup guys, so don't piss on my leg and tell me its raining.
I can imagine a better explanation from instagam easily. It wouldn't start with "Legal documents are easy to misinterpret", it would start with "It's no secret that lawyers will write contract terms as strongly in our favor as possible in a general cover-your-ass measure. Even though we don't plan to do the thing you're all so pissed off about, we sure had them write the terms in a way that gives us room to change our minds in future and actually do most of what you are worried about."
Actually, I guess I can't imagine that. They don't have the balls to admit that. They did the standard lawyer-over-the-shoulder thing of calling it all this big misunderstanding, and we really should have just trusted them to be more benevolent all along.
Re: Instagram's official response
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why will it come back to bite them?
Because some day they will want to do the things he is insisting they "have no intention" of doing and this post will come back to bite them.
How will it bite them? The blog post has no legal bearing, and they can just claim they changed their minds - circumstances have changed, etc.
Re: Instagram's official response
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren't running a charity, you're right about that. But I think they misrepresented their business by giving it away for free, knowing full-well that it won't be sustainable in the long run under that model. Their response? "Oh ok, no problem, we'll just switch the terms of use while nobody is looking."
You could characterize it that way, or you could assume that all of your users aren't complete fools and realize at some point they will have to make money to pay for the costs of running the service. They also know full-well that it isn't sustainable to run this service for free forever.
So what you're essentially saying is, it's ok to lie to your users as long as you assume they know you are lying.