Instagram Rights Grab?

Musicman

Musicman

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Rob Telford
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Instagram's new Terms of Service, which take effect from 16 Jan, appear to grant them the right to use sell your photos to advertisers without any payment to you

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/what-instagrams-new-terms-of-service-mean-for-you/

New York Times said:
2. You could star in an advertisement — without your knowledge.

A section of the new terms of service, titled “Rights,” notes that Instagram will also be able to use your photographs and identity in advertisements. “You agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you,” the new terms say. This means that photographs uploaded to Instagram could end up in an advertisement on the service or on Facebook. In addition, someone who doesn’t use Instagram could end up in an advertisement if they have their photograph snapped and shared on the service by a friend. Facebook already runs ads that make use of people’s activity on its site.
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Musicman said:
Instagram's new Terms of Service, which take effect from 16 Jan, appear to grant them the right to use sell your photos to advertisers without any payment to you

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/what-instagrams-new-terms-of-service-mean-for-you/
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Funny enough, just read this on cnet. To quote "Instagram said today that it has the perpetual right to sell users' photographs without payment or notification, a dramatic policy shift that quickly sparked a public outcry."
I am going to do some digging around, but if it's true, I will be deleting my Instagram account.
 
Aye, I haven't read them fully yet, but will fully in the next week or so, but on the surface it looks like they will basically be able to do what they want with them. However, not going to jump to any conclusions based on newspaper interpretations just yet.

Mind you, with the rubbish i post to instagram... :gag:
 
I have often thought that people that upload images to other peoples sites are playing into the hands of the owner of such sites.
We must realise that the owners of such sites are in it for gain and ultimately “profit”!
If you must upload images do it on your own site, so that you have control.
The goal of such sites is to turn your content into profit for them!
You and your content are just a means to an end.
 
bulldog5988 said:
I have often thought that people that upload images to other peoples sites are playing into the hands of the owner of such sites.
We must realise that the owners of such sites are in it for gain and ultimately “profit”!
If you must upload images do it on your own site, so that you have control.
The goal of such sites is to turn your content into profit for them!
You and your content are just a means to an end.
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this is a valid point - I would like a quick easy way to upload phone pics to my own server or wp installation from my phone, and a link to it then posted to a specific fb account or twitter. However it is one of those things that I am sure is doable, but I just haven't had the time to look into it. Like most people I imagine, there is a laziness/ease thing too, when there are already things like instagram that link easily with those various accounts.

Having said that, twitter and instagram are in having a mighty fallout at the moment too, and that link is less than as effective as it was, and may eventually collapse altogether if they dont sort out their differences. Twitter have developed their own picture/'vintage' editing facility, so no doubt their T&C's will change in the future if the rights grab isn't there already.
 
bulldog5988 said:
We must realise that the owners of such sites are in it for gain and ultimately “profit”!
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There's no such thing as a free lunch.

I can't begin to imagine how much the infrastructure costs to setup and run, at some point they presumably had a plan to flip to commercial exploitation of their service.

Which either means charging you to use it or leveraging (your) IP to turn a coin.

Whether you truly believe that anything of (true) value is there in the first place is a different debate :)
 
No surprise really, there was such a big out cry about this when FB took over, i used to be totally addicted to Instagram but then the spam got so bad i only post now and again:)
 
treeman said:
Ah praise the lord! does this mean users will be leaving in their droves and I no longer have to suffer the deluge of insatagrammed pics of utter rubbish
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Nope you will have a deluge of more crap as that's what people will only post from now on lol:p
 
treeman said:
Ah praise the lord! does this mean users will be leaving in their droves and I no longer have to suffer the deluge of insatagrammed pics of utter rubbish
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Where? In Instagram? Surely you only see pics of from people you follow or things you've searched for?
 
Not surprised fb buying it has ruined it! I was looking forward to playing around with it as I've only just got an iPhone. Typical. It's why I use Flickr and 500px as they're paid for so you're not the product.
 
srichards said:
Not surprised fb buying it has ruined it! I was looking forward to playing around with it as I've only just got an iPhone. Typical. It's why I use Flickr and 500px as they're paid for so you're not the product.
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And remember, Flickr now offers filters too.
 
gnirtS said:
I never did see the point in a service that takes a mundane photo and makes it 100% worse through processing.

So now they own the rights to several hundred million god-awful, commercially unusable rubbish! Great...
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I don't think all that many actually used the camera, maybe some do with filters but i didn't really like them.
 
The resolution is so crap I can't see anyone wanting them plus the search is rubbish too. Ill be deleting my account though if this stays
 
POAH said:
The resolution is so crap I can't see anyone wanting them plus the search is rubbish too. Ill be deleting my account though if this stays
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Resolution and square crop has always been an issue, considering the popularity of the app i'm surprised it never changed. when FB first bought it alot went over to Tadaa for those 2 resaons alone....... Think i'll stick with Flickr!
 
Be interesting to see if they stick it out.

There was already rockiness when Twitter announced they'd be adding photos and filters, and now Instagram has made the news with this rights grab.

Hopefully enough people care and delete their accounts that they change their mind, if not, people will move on to somewhere else.
 
Yeah most people don't give a monkey's about the rights issue, they just don't see any value to their images... and to be honest, for 99.9% of them it is because they are truly worthless.

The "value" will only be when Instagram/FB pick some out to be used as their adverts and then those will have some worth.... which will always be the best of what is left, regardless of where that bar is set.
 
The only way that I'd let Instagram use my images. ;)


 
The thing is, the majority of users of Instagram probably wont read the new T&C's or will just tick the box and carry on as usual totally unaware that their images can be used in the way that Instagram dictate in the new t&c's...
 
Slightly worrying for me as I use it to display some of my work, as do my clients.

This may be the reason you can now only post square images...
 
I think people saying the images on Instagram are useless and that no one would want to use them anyway are being incredibly naive. A snapshot of someone in a restaurant is valuable to the restaurant if the people appear to be enjoying themselves or have titled the image in a way that suggests they like the place.

Normal people aren't going to see it and think "If they'd used X camera they could have avoided that ISO noise, they should have upped the shutter speed to get rid of the slight camera shake and they really should have given more thought to the composition and the way the light is falling on their faces". They're going to see normal people like them enjoying a meal.
Creepiness aside it'll be a refreshing change from the horrible plastic people you usually get in adverts.

Look at the way companies, even broadcasting companies, are falling over themselves to incorporate Twitter posts into their activities.

Instagram's image style is a language which a sizeable chunk of normal people now use to share their world with others and it's beneficial to businesses to speak the same language as their potential customers. It might be a flash in the pan that'll die out soon but it is here right now and they'll use it as best they can.

gnirtS said:
Can't see why this would be any different.
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I'd imagine it'll be slightly different because it's a purely "content" based site and they do need content providers (if no one posted images on Facebook it wouldn't really matter whereas Instagram wouldn't exist if people didn't post images on it) but it'll still be insignificant because the number of people seeing themselves as content providers who are being abused will be tiny.
 
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The new T&C's contain some very broad language by lawyers which is commonplace when big companies want to protect future business interests. The question is not whether they would, at any point, but that they feel its appropriate and more importantly that most people won't care.

As photographers we're very aware of our rights and property, and moreso where it is our livelihood, but a lot of other people may well be quite apathetic to this move (as many of us have been with the gradual stripping of user rights and protections contained in terms of service). It is true that this ought to be expected when services and websites are free to use, but more people ought to be aware of the implications of being complicit in this.

For what its worth I blogged about this today.

http://www.davidanthonyfearn.com/blog/2012/12/new-terms-for-instagram
 
DazJW said:
I think people saying the images on Instagram are useless and that no one would want to use them anyway are being incredibly naive.
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Pretty much any image can have value if you market it in the right kind of way - its whether or not there is any value in trying a thousand different outlets for it only to recover pennies for your effort.

I suppose you could bigdata the hell out of it and use user provided tag and GPS locations then bombard those locations with emails offering them stock prices on advertising usage of the images and give them a web interface to browse the content?

Not quite sure how repeatable that is as a business concept though, I think the yield per customer will be pretty low and the frequency of return even lower. Maybe there is a quite low initial break even point, we can't know i guess until we receive the first sales pitch from them.

That all being said, does anyone really believe that they are about to try this sort of full on commercialisation/rights rape?
 
Ricardodaforce said:
Adios Instagram. I have just deleted my account.
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What did you use, I tried the link and stopped half way, probably everyone else using it
 
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