I wouldn't much care about my Facebook statuses somehow being used as advertising, or even my tweets for that matter. They're just things I've said publicly and social networks have trained me not to expect any control over them anymore.
On the other hand, photos are much more personal: they're works of art, at their own level.
So I think whether you care or not depends not only on your stance regarding privacy and all that, but also how you frame your use of Instagram: is it a way to post status updates disguised as photos, or photos disguised as status updates?
> social networks have trained me not to expect any control over them anymore
I think this is the major issue that will define the internet landscape in the long term. People indeed got trained not to care about privacy and just like with "war on terror", they gradually give up their rights and freedom for the sake of "security" and "better user experience".
Soon enough anyone who speaks out of user rights or privacy will be seen as a mad man akin to RMS these days. 10 years back, a site, which required a scan of your government issued ID in order to change your name would be deemed insane. Now it's a common practice.
Instagram's target market doesn't care. These aren't professional photographers, or even amateur ones like flickr, they're teens and 20-somethings with camera phones who want to be able to take and share cool photos with their friends.
(Put another way: the right of publicity will limit commercial use of Instagram photos, at least in the states that recognize it. But TMZ is editorial use, not commercial use.)
The person reading and agreeing to the TOS is not necessarily the same person as the one(s) appearing in the photos. It is the latter that needs to sign a model release.
In the UK I think the person has to be "featured", ie a central focus(?), to require a model release - based on the ECHR right to a private life for example; exclusions apply for news reporting it seems.
The point about the model release form is interesting. While you can sign away your own rights to your photos, you can't sign away the rights of friends and strangers who appear in them.
According to Wikipedia[1]:
"Publishing an identifiable photo of a person without a model release signed by that person can result in civil liability for whoever publishes the photograph."
But wouldn't it mean the user who uploaded the photo is liable, not Instagram? -- I asked off of the Pinterest TOS drama earlier this year: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3660323
Not sure I agree with this. I think the social connections on Instagram are much weaker then on Facebook (hence my comparison). The moment Instagram appears not to be in fashion anymore people can leave without giving up much.
Granted, I'm not an Instagram user so I could be entirely wrong but the network effects of Instagram don't seem to be strong enough to push their users around too much.
Oh, I think you're right there. My point is that the people who use it won't care about this issue - this isn't the thing that's going to drive them away.
It's far more likely to be something less damaging but more obvious to users, like in-feed advertising.
I'm starting to realize that Instagram is not the service I thought it was. I initially thought it was Flickr with social features, but more and more it's turning into Facebook with photos.
There is zero content discoveries features, so you have no way to get new followers or find new people to follow. And the top posters are all teenage pop stars that I've never even heard about who post completely uninteresting photos.
The more Instagram turns into Facebook, the more this opens up a spot for another company to build an actual social network around photos. Whether this will be 500px, Flickr (again), or somebody else entirely, I don't know.
As soon as i read that FB was buying Instagram i quit and deleted my Instagram account. It was too predictable that something like this will happen.
Mark Zuckerberg is in a horrible position. I bet he would love to just build a cool and useful product. Instead he is damned to roll out all these awful money making features. And quick. Not only for his investors but also for the staff that owns FB stock.
How smooth could FB move along if their investors trusted them like they trust Jeff Bezos and his very long-term view.
It should be noted that Bezos also had significant bond issues that nobody thought they could make payments on. They were down in the junk bond basement. If he had failed to make those payments, Amazon would have become yet another failed dot com, just like eToys. (Which went out of business while making a profit - just not enough profit to make bond payments on excess warehousing purchased because they overestimated growth for 2000 after underestimating it in 1999.)
Would it be viable to let users opt-in to selling their photos, with users and Instagram splitting the money? That seems to be a system that would appeal to both sides.
I've always had issues with certain details on Flickr (perhaps since the Yahoo acquisition; I honestly can't remember what was just carried over) such as the inability to download all your photos at once for backup, lockout of your own photos when your pro membership expires (combined with the aforementioned non-feature), and some other things. But as far as I can tell, the community is definitely there. Whenever I am doing research on1 particular piece of equipment or materials (chemicals mostly) I'll often find a fairly helpful discussion on Flickr, and with plenty of well-tagged shots to back it up.
Earlier this year while I was staying in Ginza for the weekend a spring popped inside one of my lenses. I have some experience repairing and rebuilding mechanical SLRs (not so much lenses) but without any tools or parts I was hoping to find a repair shop nearby that wouldn't break the bank. Ended up finding a pic on Flickr from someone who had the same issue a few years ago of him and the repairman with his Victor Hasselblad diploma, and his business card. Totally random place on the 8th floor in San-chome, but he was a great guy who I never would've met if not for that post.
I would like downloading everything to zip to be a pro feature, and a reminder that the feature exists in an email maybe one week prior to expiration. If customers leave, let them leave happily. They'll be much more likely to come back when they want/need the service again.
Flickr never locks you out of access to your photos, per se.
The only difference is that your photostream is limited to 200 photos. Every other way that photos are accessed continues to work - whether you've embedded them on blogs, other people favorited them, etc.
There are 3rd party tools to export your photos from Flickr via the API. Flickr hasn't written their own exporter (they probably should) but exporting apps aren't blocked.
That's what I thought too, but when I tried to grab them with existing apps the only way I could get it to work was by adding everything to a group and then searching for that. Can't remember if it was FlickrDown that finally worked or something else– three others flat out failed to capture anything until I resubscribed. So in theory they're still there, but they sure don't make it easy.
> I've always had issues with certain details on Flickr (perhaps since the Yahoo acquisition; I honestly can't remember what was just carried over) such as the inability to download all your photos at once for backup
The dozens of Flickr downloader apps, and countless free scripts on GitHub, let you not only download them all for backup, but often will keep them in sync with folders. Even iPhoto has this sync built in.
> lockout of your own photos when your pro membership expires (combined with the aforementioned non-feature), and some other things.
They notify you before it expires, and said tools take not long at all.
What's more, their policy is incredibly generous: they retain all the photos for you, and when you re-up, everything's back as it was. That's extraordinary customer service.
>There is zero content discoveries features, so you have no way to get new followers or find new people to follow.
Instagram has had an Explore view for a while now.
>And the top posters are all teenage pop stars that I've never even heard about who post completely uninteresting photos.
To be honest, I look at a lot of Instagram data because I work on a photo sharing startup that uses their API extensively, and the network as a whole is completely dominated by teen girls vying for each other's attention. The amount of content they create and consume is mind numbing.
It doesn't matter who the target market is. This can create a precedence, and make other "social" enterprises greedier. While I understand a contract can specify almost anything and there's always "if you don't like it, don't use it" way of looking at this, but there should be a basic sense of decency among all that claim to be serving the wider public.
Sense of decency often loses against profit. That's why I think this quote from RMS is relevant when it comes to the old "if you don't like it, don't use it":
"All in all, I think it is a mistake to defend people's rights with one
hand tied behind our backs, using nothing except the individual option
to say no to a deal. We should use democracy to organize and together
impose limits on what the rich can do to the rest of us. That's what
democracy was invented for!"
Decency does lose against short-term profit, esp. when we're talking about public companies. However, there are companies that somehow strike a better deal with their shareholders and try not to screw their customers all the time.
I found Roger Martin's book "Fixing the Game" to descibe interesting case studies and proposals on how to fix the short-term greed problem. Perhaps Instagram's board should read it?
For such simple services, reputation is all there is. Building next photo sharing service is easy (perhaps already free on github?) and competitors are waiting for Instagram's slippage.
People are very predictable if you know enough about them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlates_of_crime Criminality is essentially a combination of low dopamine, low serotonin and low adrenaline levels. Stress chemicals such as cortisol can rapidly deplete neurotransmitter levels. There is also an inverse correlation between socioeconomic status and criminality. Being poor means more stress and lower levels of those neurotransmitters.
The impulsivity caused by dopamine deficiency also causes more unwanted pregnancies - another risk factor for criminality.
So there is clearly a strong correlation between the effects of being poor or in poverty and criminality. Since the law is specifically designed to 'deal' with criminality, it is a mechanism which is quite biased against the poor. Hence, the law is there to protect the rich from the poor.
Well sure, and we've been seeing the revenue frog boiling for some years now, but companies will eventually get too greedy, and an ungreedy alternative will steal everybody away. Instagram is a gimmick that pretty much anybody can copy, and the network (FB) is pretty much the only gateway to the future they have, and is the only edge they have over anybody else. I wouldn't be surprised if a Hipstamatic resurgence gets fed by the mere ability to display pics in Twitter cards. Nobody cares about the URL.
I know several professional photographers who use Instagram regularly (and are worth following). I suspect this will not sit well with some of them. I'm especially curious if Instagram will let people leave and remove their old photos easily.
Some of them also post professional images they've imported from their computer (not just phone images).
For example, here's an image taken by Jose Villa (high-end wedding photographer) for Williams Sonoma's gift registry:
http://instagram.com/p/STxUVcrodv/
What's gonna happen when IG sells ads with those kind of images?
Why is he even using Instagram? Doesn't seem like he used any filter there, did he? Seems like he's just using it to promote his own DSLR-made photos. Google+ might be a better target for that kind of community.
It's a distribution channel - one where all the cool kids currently hang out. He could also be on G+ and Facebook and Twitter and Quora and Reddit and MySpace...and...and...
The technology of each is basically irrelevant if there is an attractive audience, as all of us participating on this site clearly demonstrates.
Instagram is commonly used to upload pictures for linking on Twitter, which is a considerably wider social network than Google+. I expect that'll change pretty rapidly pretty soon.
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 dependent on who you are and how you use the service. Instagram is much more wide open than G+ as well, people are much more likely to share content to only a few people on G+ and thus you'll never see that content (or any replies). From what I've heard from photographers, G+ is definitely an active place to share photos.
That would have possibly been true before the Facebook acquisition, but once the sale went through, I got about 20-30 new requests from people that were on FB but not Instagram, and I'm not even remotely popular. I can't say the FB to G+ conversion I saw (amongst non-techies) was as strong.
You're also not accounting for the fact that Instagram is a mobile app with a single focus. I don't want to go into my G+ app and filter by photos and hope to get the same quickly-see-what-my-friends-are-up-to experience I can with Instagram, just like I wouldn't post those kinds of photos to G+ to begin with. It's a very informal platform and I don't think G+ comes close to replicating that experience.
Just glancing at it, it seems the photos sold there are from users who signed up to have their photos sold there. Under the "Turn Your Instagram Photos Into a Profitable Online Business" at the bottom.
So the claim that Instagram is establishing the right to sell your photos is supported in the article with this language:
It says that "a business or other entity may pay us to display your... photos... in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you."
I read this as intended to say "when we display your photos (as part of our own service), we may serve up ads to be displayed next to them and not give you a cut of the proceeds".
I don't mean to argue that the language can't be interpreted to let FB sell the pictures but it doesn't look to me as intended for that purpose.
In any case, the usual scenario of virtualized user outrage will be followed by backpedaling by Instagram. 2% of the user base will vow to never use the servie again, and then all will go on as before.
You glibly ignore the previous paragraph that references the section which establishes the rights for Instagram/Facebook to do whatever it likes with the Content.
And since when is "intent" ever part of US law (especially with regards to IP)...
You seem to argue (by the use of "glibly") that the presence of the transferability clause leaves no other interpretation possible than that that transfer will be for use of user content by third part in return for payment. However, the clause may also be there to allow use of content on other services owned by Instagram's parent.
I was quite explicit that I was giving my read of the intent, not my assessment of what Instagram could legally get away with. The transferability clause does not change my reading of the intent.
Bingo!
In Tuesday's blog post, Mr. Systrom sought to quell the mounting unrest and reassure users that the company would not be peddling photographs of children playing on the beach or friends partying in nightclubs to the highest bidder.
"To be clear, it is not our intention to sell your photos," he said.
What I am trying to figure out is: does this apply to 'private' accounts as well? I see no statement that seems to exempt private accounts from these new policies, but would definitely like to hear a conclusive statement regarding this.
This is not new. It seems that their new TOS explicitly lays out that your photos may be used in advertising, possibly due to a new law somewhere requiring specific notification and release, but my understanding is that you'd already given them this right based on this clause:
By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the Instagram Services, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels, except Content not shared publicly ("private") will not be distributed outside the Instagram Services.
Yes, that's in the old TOS, and it's pretty much boilerplate for any site with user-generated content. That language certainly seems to me like it would cover uses in advertising or even Instagram reselling your images as a "stock photo" site. This kind of clause is required so that users can't attempt to entrap the service provider by uploading content and then claiming that Instagram didn't have a license to utilize it and therefore had violated copyright, and also probably as a fallback policy in case a cranky user spotted their image in a stream or feed or video or something (or, alternately, that the server is hacked and db is leaked, and thousands of claims of "unauthorized use" come flooding in).
IANAL but pretty much this is a non-story. They've simply decided to specifically inform you that a license to " non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels" includes use in advertisement, as one would reasonably believe it does.
I don't think you are correct. The old TOS did not allow them to resell your pics. Also note they are saying your private pics will now be fair game as well.
You are correct that the old TOS seems pretty standard, but these changes are not trivial.
tosback.com from the EFF used to do this, but it was taken offline a few days ago. I think someone took a look at it after the Facebook user agreement thing and either wanted to upgrade it or noticed some problems.
Find the old text somewhere. Get the new text. Copypaste both in a text file. Then use diff or meld or another difftool of your choice to compare the two text files.
Presumably they meant, when you're 'asked to agree' to new T&C's the diff changes in the new policy are highlighted.
When presented with a new T&C's policy, shouldn't you explicitly be asked to agree to any changes from the previous one you agreed to rather than be presented with the entire 14 pages which approximately 0.00001% of people will ever read before agreeing to?
(And please don't say you read every EULA you encounter in full)
Agreed with aptwebapps. The old TOU, as you correctly say, is pretty standard. Twitter's is similar, and any company with decent lawyers is going to protect themselves with similar wording.
The new TOU, however, heads in a different direction. The phrase "limited license" is gone. It's been replaced with the phrase "transferable, sub-licensable" license. Also new is "a business or other entity may pay us to display your... photos... in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you."
Transferable is a very important word. So is sub-licensable. Those were NOT in the old terms of use.
It really doesn't seem like a material change to me. Again, IANAL, so if there is some reason to believe these things would be disallowed under the old TOS, I'd like to know, but it sounds fairly straightforward. While Instagram may have had a more difficult case under the old TOS, and may have had to be more careful about the dispensation rather than just doing a blatant "stock photo"-type interface, I could definitely see an attempt at the argument that representation in "any media formats through any media channels" covers Instagram in most cases of what would be considered "transferred sub-licensing".
The clarifications, of course, are intended to clarify the consent they're taking. I'd be interested to know their motives for this; as I speculated in the parent, does a new law take effect in an important market with regard to advertising? Are they just trying to play it safe? Are they going to make aggressive moves into this kind of space (reselling user photos, using users' profiles without consent in advertisements) and wanted to ensure that they didn't have to deal with any lawsuits upon launch?
I will agree that the new TOS allows them to use your profile and likeness as they see fit, which based on my simple layman's reading, isn't included in the old TOS.
You granted Instagram a license. Under the old ToS, 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, period. This changed.
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's license to replicate your content in "any media formats through any media channels", as Instagram exercised their license to place it there.
As I said, they'd probably have difficulty operating as a blatant competitor to iStockPhoto, but I think if they'd structured things with a modicum of cleverness, their old ToS would allow them to get away with most of what's explicitly covered in the new ToS.
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 losing a 100-million dollar class-action lawsuit is a million dollar cost, plus legal fees.)
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.
It would seem that the key difference is in the first example Instagram has to be involved in the nightclub venture. Which is all fine and dandy for an Instagram themed nightclub or nightclub event. Now however, and this is the kicker, Instagram can let as many nightclubs as they want use the photos without Instagram having to be involved or even disclose their involvement with anyone.
TLDR - Before: Instagram had to have clear collaboration.(which would limit how many people they could sale your photos to.) After: Instagram does not have to show clear collaboration.
Its about how it occurs to the general public. HMers know that if they want to they can use your images, but I have seen people on my Facebook and Twitter saying this is too far and theyre not posting to Instagram anymore.
I agree... that is how you create news where it does not deserve one... I don't think Instagram would like paying billions of dollar in privacy suits for a 10$ photo.
this is just an anguished news writer probably snubbed by Facebook...
That old TOS is pretty standard language required for any online service to show photos that you upload. Flickr, Google, etc are all pretty similar. A few times a year a bunch of FUD springs up among more old-school photographers who become terrified that such language means that Flickr (or Google) wants to steal and own all of their images.
These new TOS however - absolutely appalling. In the past year we've seen professionals flock to instagram to help promote their craft - with the new language I'd imagine you'll see a mass exodus from those folks pretty quickly.
Perhaps those professionals should contact Instagram about the valuable service they provide and how much they can pay for this service that promotes their business.
I'm shocked, shocked to find out that Instagram plans to monetize their service via advertising.
Advertising and the uncompensated appropriation of intellectual property are two different concepts. This is neatly disguised theft, hidden in legalese. Get over the Casablanca quotes. Here's the relevant citation:
Google Plus monetizes via advertising. Google Plus is also extremely photographer friendly and has cultivated a large thriving community of professional photographers. The Instagram terms are just ghastly.
What a wonderfully missed opportunity. Had they decided to share profits from content with authors they could attract more professional photographers to their service. I can't imagine any pro author will publish beautiful photos on Instagram now, and I suspect the service will just be flooded with amateur photos. And who is going to pay them for that?
Yep, make that an opt-in feature, add some light ads, and you have a full business model.
I believe they may have just wanted to spare themselves the headache of a money system and of people who would reupload other people's pictures or copyrighted works for their own profit.
I hope casual and regular Instagram users riot over this change (doubt it, really), honestly, not for their sake, or to spite Facebook or Instagram, but simply because I'd really hate it if they started doing this, and it turns out to be an awesome money maker. I don't look forward to a web where that precedent is set.
:/ then this thing is serious. I deleted my account, but I don't mind the photos in it (I had ~250). But some people has tons of photos and this may be a problem.
Hopefully it just takes a little time when deleting the account to go through and delete the individual photos, but I'll be deleting the individual photos before I delete my account to be safe.
I've been trying to delete individual photos and I think they limit the rate at which you can do this. I feel it's something like 10 photos per hour. If I try to delete more, they just pop back in on my Android phone.
I need to note that the date I "deleted" my photographs was May 25, 2012. That is 7 months ago and still in the possession of Facebook.
Also, I forgot to include the screenshot of the photograph being hosted on the dummy account just before I deleted it and the account;
http://spacestation.co/I1ry
Dont worry! The founders of instagram where afraid of this as well and they devised a poison pill before they sold out! All you images have been made useless for any commercial use by the application of shitty "lets make it look like a polaroid left in the sun for 30 years"-filters...
Presumably Instagram would not have the right to sell photos from people that restrict the viewing of their photos in public. I have my profile set up so only those people I "approve" to follow me can see them.
The language in the TOS says "you can control who can view certain of your Content and activities on the Service". Note that key qualifier: on the Service. It does not say that you can control who can view your Content by other means; so if they sold your photos to someone else who made them viewable through some other means, you can't control that. At least, that's the way I read it; IANAL.
I'm having a real hard time deleting my account, because I used plus addressing in the email when I signed up for Instagram. This is making it impossible for me to log in to the web version of Instagram which is as far as I can tell the only way to delete an account… Suppose I'll have to write support, if there is such a thing.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadOn the other hand, photos are much more personal: they're works of art, at their own level.
So I think whether you care or not depends not only on your stance regarding privacy and all that, but also how you frame your use of Instagram: is it a way to post status updates disguised as photos, or photos disguised as status updates?
I think this is the major issue that will define the internet landscape in the long term. People indeed got trained not to care about privacy and just like with "war on terror", they gradually give up their rights and freedom for the sake of "security" and "better user experience".
Soon enough anyone who speaks out of user rights or privacy will be seen as a mad man akin to RMS these days. 10 years back, a site, which required a scan of your government issued ID in order to change your name would be deemed insane. Now it's a common practice.
Welcome to the Matrix, gentlemen.
(Put another way: the right of publicity will limit commercial use of Instagram photos, at least in the states that recognize it. But TMZ is editorial use, not commercial use.)
http://www.apug.org/forums/forum137/82809-legalities-relatin...
After 20 minutes of searching with Google and reading on about 10 websites I couldn't find any photog sites that even reference the law ...
According to Wikipedia[1]:
"Publishing an identifiable photo of a person without a model release signed by that person can result in civil liability for whoever publishes the photograph."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_release
1) Usually it does not make sense to sue amateur photographer.
2) It may make sense to sue Instagram and their clients, especially when serious money are involved.
IANAL
Granted, I'm not an Instagram user so I could be entirely wrong but the network effects of Instagram don't seem to be strong enough to push their users around too much.
It's far more likely to be something less damaging but more obvious to users, like in-feed advertising.
There is zero content discoveries features, so you have no way to get new followers or find new people to follow. And the top posters are all teenage pop stars that I've never even heard about who post completely uninteresting photos.
The more Instagram turns into Facebook, the more this opens up a spot for another company to build an actual social network around photos. Whether this will be 500px, Flickr (again), or somebody else entirely, I don't know.
Mark Zuckerberg is in a horrible position. I bet he would love to just build a cool and useful product. Instead he is damned to roll out all these awful money making features. And quick. Not only for his investors but also for the staff that owns FB stock.
How smooth could FB move along if their investors trusted them like they trust Jeff Bezos and his very long-term view.
I never looked at it that way. Great thought.
I think facebook could make quite a bit of money if they charged for their developer API.
Look what Bezos had to go through to get where he is today: http://i.imgur.com/2ie9t.png
Not attacking. Just wanted to hear more specific thoughts.
Earlier this year while I was staying in Ginza for the weekend a spring popped inside one of my lenses. I have some experience repairing and rebuilding mechanical SLRs (not so much lenses) but without any tools or parts I was hoping to find a repair shop nearby that wouldn't break the bank. Ended up finding a pic on Flickr from someone who had the same issue a few years ago of him and the repairman with his Victor Hasselblad diploma, and his business card. Totally random place on the 8th floor in San-chome, but he was a great guy who I never would've met if not for that post.
The only difference is that your photostream is limited to 200 photos. Every other way that photos are accessed continues to work - whether you've embedded them on blogs, other people favorited them, etc.
There are 3rd party tools to export your photos from Flickr via the API. Flickr hasn't written their own exporter (they probably should) but exporting apps aren't blocked.
The dozens of Flickr downloader apps, and countless free scripts on GitHub, let you not only download them all for backup, but often will keep them in sync with folders. Even iPhoto has this sync built in.
> lockout of your own photos when your pro membership expires (combined with the aforementioned non-feature), and some other things.
They notify you before it expires, and said tools take not long at all.
What's more, their policy is incredibly generous: they retain all the photos for you, and when you re-up, everything's back as it was. That's extraordinary customer service.
Instagram has had an Explore view for a while now.
>And the top posters are all teenage pop stars that I've never even heard about who post completely uninteresting photos.
To be honest, I look at a lot of Instagram data because I work on a photo sharing startup that uses their API extensively, and the network as a whole is completely dominated by teen girls vying for each other's attention. The amount of content they create and consume is mind numbing.
"All in all, I think it is a mistake to defend people's rights with one hand tied behind our backs, using nothing except the individual option to say no to a deal. We should use democracy to organize and together impose limits on what the rich can do to the rest of us. That's what democracy was invented for!"
I found Roger Martin's book "Fixing the Game" to descibe interesting case studies and proposals on how to fix the short-term greed problem. Perhaps Instagram's board should read it?
For such simple services, reputation is all there is. Building next photo sharing service is easy (perhaps already free on github?) and competitors are waiting for Instagram's slippage.
The impulsivity caused by dopamine deficiency also causes more unwanted pregnancies - another risk factor for criminality.
Poor people are also more likely to be religious - http://www.gallup.com/poll/116449/religion-provides-emotiona... and being religious is correlated with criminality.
So there is clearly a strong correlation between the effects of being poor or in poverty and criminality. Since the law is specifically designed to 'deal' with criminality, it is a mechanism which is quite biased against the poor. Hence, the law is there to protect the rich from the poor.
I know several professional photographers who use Instagram regularly (and are worth following). I suspect this will not sit well with some of them. I'm especially curious if Instagram will let people leave and remove their old photos easily.
Some of them also post professional images they've imported from their computer (not just phone images).
For example, here's an image taken by Jose Villa (high-end wedding photographer) for Williams Sonoma's gift registry: http://instagram.com/p/STxUVcrodv/
What's gonna happen when IG sells ads with those kind of images?
The technology of each is basically irrelevant if there is an attractive audience, as all of us participating on this site clearly demonstrates.
Like any social network, what you see is dependent on who you are and how you use the service. Instagram is much more wide open than G+ as well, people are much more likely to share content to only a few people on G+ and thus you'll never see that content (or any replies). From what I've heard from photographers, G+ is definitely an active place to share photos.
You're also not accounting for the fact that Instagram is a mobile app with a single focus. I don't want to go into my G+ app and filter by photos and hope to get the same quickly-see-what-my-friends-are-up-to experience I can with Instagram, just like I wouldn't post those kinds of photos to G+ to begin with. It's a very informal platform and I don't think G+ comes close to replicating that experience.
And, for the record, he still shoots film (not a DSLR) :)
They're the cancer that's killing Instagram
It says that "a business or other entity may pay us to display your... photos... in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you."
I read this as intended to say "when we display your photos (as part of our own service), we may serve up ads to be displayed next to them and not give you a cut of the proceeds".
I don't mean to argue that the language can't be interpreted to let FB sell the pictures but it doesn't look to me as intended for that purpose.
In any case, the usual scenario of virtualized user outrage will be followed by backpedaling by Instagram. 2% of the user base will vow to never use the servie again, and then all will go on as before.
And since when is "intent" ever part of US law (especially with regards to IP)...
I was quite explicit that I was giving my read of the intent, not my assessment of what Instagram could legally get away with. The transferability clause does not change my reading of the intent.
"To be clear, it is not our intention to sell your photos," he said.
http://gadgets.ndtv.com/apps/news/facebook-responds-to-anger...
By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the Instagram Services, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels, except Content not shared publicly ("private") will not be distributed outside the Instagram Services.
Yes, that's in the old TOS, and it's pretty much boilerplate for any site with user-generated content. That language certainly seems to me like it would cover uses in advertising or even Instagram reselling your images as a "stock photo" site. This kind of clause is required so that users can't attempt to entrap the service provider by uploading content and then claiming that Instagram didn't have a license to utilize it and therefore had violated copyright, and also probably as a fallback policy in case a cranky user spotted their image in a stream or feed or video or something (or, alternately, that the server is hacked and db is leaked, and thousands of claims of "unauthorized use" come flooding in).
IANAL but pretty much this is a non-story. They've simply decided to specifically inform you that a license to " non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels" includes use in advertisement, as one would reasonably believe it does.
You are correct that the old TOS seems pretty standard, but these changes are not trivial.
Seems like it hasn't been updated in a while though...
When presented with a new T&C's policy, shouldn't you explicitly be asked to agree to any changes from the previous one you agreed to rather than be presented with the entire 14 pages which approximately 0.00001% of people will ever read before agreeing to?
(And please don't say you read every EULA you encounter in full)
In general: people who don't take the time to read or consider their Terms of Service are not going to take the time to read or consider the changes.
The new TOU, however, heads in a different direction. The phrase "limited license" is gone. It's been replaced with the phrase "transferable, sub-licensable" license. Also new is "a business or other entity may pay us to display your... photos... in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you."
Transferable is a very important word. So is sub-licensable. Those were NOT in the old terms of use.
-- Material Adverse Change. For the consumer.
The clarifications, of course, are intended to clarify the consent they're taking. I'd be interested to know their motives for this; as I speculated in the parent, does a new law take effect in an important market with regard to advertising? Are they just trying to play it safe? Are they going to make aggressive moves into this kind of space (reselling user photos, using users' profiles without consent in advertisements) and wanted to ensure that they didn't have to deal with any lawsuits upon launch?
I will agree that the new TOS allows them to use your profile and likeness as they see fit, which based on my simple layman's reading, isn't included in the old TOS.
Just thinking out loud here, move along.
As I said, they'd probably have difficulty operating as a blatant competitor to iStockPhoto, but I think if they'd structured things with a modicum of cleverness, their old ToS would allow them to get away with most of what's explicitly covered in the new ToS.
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.
TLDR - Before: Instagram had to have clear collaboration.(which would limit how many people they could sale your photos to.) After: Instagram does not have to show clear collaboration.
By "thinking out loud" you're begging people to not move along, much like the guy holding forth in Times Square.
this is just an anguished news writer probably snubbed by Facebook...
These new TOS however - absolutely appalling. In the past year we've seen professionals flock to instagram to help promote their craft - with the new language I'd imagine you'll see a mass exodus from those folks pretty quickly.
I'm shocked, shocked to find out that Instagram plans to monetize their service via advertising.
Zuck: People Just Submitted it...
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb Fucks
See a pattern here?
http://statspotting.com/2012/12/instagrams-policy-changes-is...
I believe they may have just wanted to spare themselves the headache of a money system and of people who would reupload other people's pictures or copyrighted works for their own profit.
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 photograph of an account that was deleted right after the Facebook acquisition announcement. http://distilleryimage6.instagram.com/6d96aaa0a45611e1a9f712...
Hopefully it just takes a little time when deleting the account to go through and delete the individual photos, but I'll be deleting the individual photos before I delete my account to be safe.
Also, I forgot to include the screenshot of the photograph being hosted on the dummy account just before I deleted it and the account; http://spacestation.co/I1ry
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4936807 [1]