Facebook’s photo-sharing site Instagram has updated its privacy policy giving it the right to sell users’ photos to advertisers without notification.
Unless users delete their Instagram accounts by a deadline of 16 January, they cannot opt out.
Any way you spin it, using someone else’s work without payment or consent is theft, pure and simple. Using it commercially without payment compounds that theft. That they are giving people a deadline to close their accounts is neither here, nor there. Those images belong to the photographer, not FaceFuck. It does rather tend to underpin my distaste for this organisation. Not content with having made millions (billions?), they want to raid ordinary peoples’ photographs for free and flog them on. The very least they should be doing is paying royalties.
Facebook’s vice-president of global marketing solutions Carolyn Everson earlier this month had said: “Eventually we’ll figure out a way to monetise Instagram.”
And it does look as if they have discovered how to do it – by stealing content and selling it on.
I don’t use Facebook or Instagram and now you can be sure that I never will.
Jezz if these people are outraged by this change in terms of Instagram, wait until they find out how Facebook uses and commercialises thier personal data.
Some people are so fucking stupid it suspends belief. Giving such pillocks access to computers is like giving an amplifier to a bad street busker.
The problem is that they really haven’t. Anyone with any worthwhile content on Instagram will now delete it, leaving Facebook with nothing but lots of sepia-toned pictures of people’s lunches.
Thing is, most of these companies can’t make a real, tangible profit. There’s a term in startups “build to flip”. You aren’t building a company with a model that includes a profit, you’re building a company that some larger company is going to buy from you. If you don’t sell it within 12-18 months of starting it, you will run out of money.
Any way you spin it, using someone else’s work without payment or consent is theft, pure and simple.
I agree with you, but…
… Instagram’s customers have been using Instagram’s software, storage space and bandwidth without paying a penny for years. Any Instagram user who didn’t see this coming is an utter mug.
No one paid anything to use Instagram; Instagram is a business, and their business model will require a revenue stream. If you have paid nothing for a commodity, then it is inevitable that you and your data are, in fact, the commodity.
DK
Flickr provides a similar free service. Any images sold are done so with the photographer’s agreement and the photographer retains all rights to the image as well as being paid royalties. It’s an honest business model. Facebook’s model is far from honest or equitable. A portion of the royalties in exchange for the hosting would be reasonable and fair.
That said, yeah, mugs would be a fair comment.
Taking a leaf out of theiving Saatchi’s methods, obviously!
Remember the ‘phone advert where thousands (well, hundreds) of people were jumping up & down? On Liverpool Street Station concourse IIRC?
Well, it won lots of awards, so the agency (Saatchi’s) released shots of the making of the commercial – which included me for several seconds. Trouble is, they didn’t hire me for the final advert.
So theiving Saatchi’s have used my image, world-wide, for advertising purposes, & I haven’t had a penny.
That said, facebook are obviously, as you say, crooked theiving shites & I hope someone sues them.
I doubt this would fly in a UK court.
For assignment of copyright you need ‘informed consent’, simply changing the T&Cs (whether or not the users are informed) is unlikely to be viewed as such. I looked into something similar, yet far less sinister, for a number of universities a few years ago and the outcome was that, even if students’ registration forms included ‘consent’ for the assignment of copyright of any of their work to the university we would be laughed out of court at the first instance of trying to enforce such an assignment.
US is a somewhat different bag and I’ll plead ignorance as to how it would work cross border.
ianal but most (all?) big employers have employment terms which state that anything you invent while employed, even in your own time, becomes their property if it relates in any way to the nature of your employment.
Does that “fly” in the UK courts?
I’d be surprised if it didn’t, the likes of GSK and IBM are not exactly stupid.
Network Rail does. To be fair, it’s reasonable as the employee has access to the employer’s resources and knowledge.
Repeat (yet again) after me:
If you’re not paying, you are the product rather than the customer.
Could there be a clearer proof?
It does rather tend to underpin my distaste for this organisation.
A distaste I’ve blogged on since 2007.