Facebook Claims Right to Sell Your Instagram Photos; Continues Aggressive Strategy of Becoming Destested
Back in April I described 2012 as “The Year of the Forced Upgrade” and made the not-particularly-revolutionary claim that end users were no longer the target market of social media sites like Facebook, but rather part of a product it was selling to other corporations. About a month later I predicted a fast and ugly slide in quality for Facebook after founder Mark Zuckerberg finished playing with his start-up and handed it off to Wall Street types.
Facebook-owned Instagram seems set to cheerfully confirm those predictions this week, with a new intellectual property policy that effectively gives the company unlimited right to use or sell anything you post via Instagram. As CNET noted yesterday,
Under the new policy, Facebook claims the perpetual right to license all public Instagram photos to companies or any other organization, including for advertising purposes, which would effectively transform the Web site into the world’s largest stock photo agency.
You’re also locked in as of January 16 — if you have an account at that time, anything on it is fair game, and likely will be forever, even if you later delete the content or your account. All your Instagram photos can, at that point, be used for anything Instagram wants, including selling them to third-party companies for their use. You, obviously, do not see a dime, or even a byline.
I pointed out last month that the Facebook copyright hoaxes were based on an absurd premise — what are you posting on Facebook that you’d want to copyright anyway? But pictures you took yourself have at least a little more artistic gravitas than cat GIFs, and I’m a little surprised that the company is so openly making a grab to fully monetize that particular asset.
Let’s all be clear on the legality and ethics here — Facebook and Instagram can write whatever policy they please, and as long as you’re storing your data on their servers, you’ve agreed to whatever terms they set forth for the use of that data. There’s nothing wrong with this particular move.
It’s just eminently dislikeable, much like all the other recent changes in Facebook.
My problem is that for marketing purposes, Facebook can be a great tool; however, if you are an artist this may no longer be where you want to market your work. Judging from what is going on soon Facebook will “own” the rights to your work and images…yet you can adverstise so much better. Tricky situation to say the least.
You make a good point. I feel bad for those who are using the sites to promote their photographs because that’s their work, their life, and if they will use it for advertising purposes and give them no money it’s really unfair. But I guess you have to decide what’s worth it, using Instagram and take the chance your pics will be used, or stop using a valuable program. I personally am a Instagram fanatic, but my pictures are just of my cats (no really..) so I don’t really care.
But, it’s not a zero-sum game here, guys. Instagram is hardly the only site one could showcase photos on. It’s fairly similar to say, Pinterest, and DeviantArt may be old fashioned now, but it’s almost certainly never going to pull the rug out on users maintaining full rights to their artistic content.
Quite honestly, if you have any intention of making money from your artistic work, you should not ever hand over your license rights wholesale like that. Likewise, people normally are paid for stock photography and modeling. Amateur or not, why should you put up with being cheap? Because you think the only thing you can possibly use is Facebook? Really? Maybe if more people walked away when they disagreed, more options would feel opened up (they’re already open. Google+ too niche for you? Fine. Try Orkut, it’s massively popular outside the anglophone world. Don’t like DeviantArt? Get adventurous and navigate registering for NicoNico).