4.3
December 18, 2012

{UPDATE} Instagram (cough: Facebook) just gave us 2 weeks to delete our accounts or license all our photos, for free, to anyone.

Instagram: your photos, going on sale, without your consent or profit.

Update: National Geographic’s last Instagram photo.

Relephant: elephant’s first Top 10 Instagrammers.

Why I hate Instagram.

Why I don’t hate Instagram.

~ Update ~

If I had the ear of Instagram:

Here’s my idea, which I’ve been talking about for weeks, as it happens, to improve Facebook (cough) Instagram. Since their coming-soon-to-a-photos-by-you changes are quite similar, I thought I’d share instead of just biiiiichin’ & moanin’. For once.

I love Instagram (see link above). As a blogger, who runs a pretty big news site, or whatever we are, we always want great photos. Instagram could and should quite easily become, in addition to what we know it as now, a unstocky-stock photo site.

All they’d have to do is, as with Flickr, allow users such as myself to mark photos as common use or private use (in the panel where we click twitter, facebook, etc). Then, all the common use photos could be reused by anyone, with a good search tool added. So I could search “put a bird on it” or “brunch” or whatever hipsterific anything, find a bunch of photos, and embed or use them in my blog. Overnight, Instagram would become the largest stock photo service in the world. Why would folks such as myself allow other folks to use our photos? The condition would be that, as with Pinterest etc, my @waylonlewis would show up, linked, in any use. So I’d get some shout-out “fame” or love and more followers, if I wanted them.

And if I were an ad agency, say, and wanted to use said images for commercial purposes, such as a major ad campaign or a hotel wanting to use images folks took of their stay at my hotel, then again I would have to give a shoutout to @whomever. Folks would love that. It would turn our feeling ripped off to our feeling like we got 15 seconds of fame. And, said ad agency or hotel would have to pay Instagram/Facebook. A share could go to the photographer, earning them money. Or, not (after all, it’d be optional, unlike the below).

That’s it. Onto the below changes, which suck.

My plan: wait to see if Instagram/Faceebook wakes up and changes these proposed changes before the 18th of January, download all my images, and move to flickr’s app full time, reluctantly. Because, as I said, I heart Instagram. What I don’t heart is being treated like an effing rights-less unhuman, while corporations demand to be treated like humans. ~ Waylon Lewis.
~

Just a little FYI: your Instagram photos are going on sale without your consent or profit unless you delete your account by January 18.

It’s more than photos of my dog and your dinner or latte. There’s some art on there. And there’s photos of their children, and your private moments.

If we aren’t paying, we’re the product. And even then, online…

…this is what it looks like when government abdicates its role as counterbalance to corporations in protecting individuals.

“So, it took Facebook about 2 months to annihilate a fine product.

It’s even more sad that about 60% of the users couldn’t give a shit about it.”

Read up:

Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos, and they don’t have to pay you (news.cnet.com)

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.

The new intellectual property policy, which takes effect on January 16, comes three months after Facebook completed its acquisition of the popular photo-sharing site. Unless Instagram users delete their accounts before the January deadline, they cannot opt out.

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. One irked Twitter user quipped that “Instagram is now the new iStockPhoto, except they won’t have to pay you anything to use your images.”

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