Instagram is threatening legal action against Pixelfed | Hacker News Reader

Instagram is threatening legal action against Pixelfed

mastodon.social

132 pointsmindracer97 comments

Ok, so this appears to be over the fact that Pixelfed copied the names of the Instagram filters 1:1. They are not generic names like "blur" or "enhance" -- they are very specific names that Instagram has associated with their filters for years, like "Clarendon" and "Ludwig".

I'm sort of reading this thread and the Mastodon thread in disbelief at the defenders. Just change the names of the darn filters! (and not "iClarendon" and "iLudwig" for heaven's sake -- that is so childish.)

There are fights worth fighting out there -- abusive patent trolls, etc. -- this is not one of them. If this escalates they will lose 100% and waste tons of time and money, both of which could be better spent on actually building Pixelfed.

Sorry -- not the world's biggest Meta/FB/IG fan here but I am 100% with them on this one and if I were in charge I'd make the exact same threats. /rant over.

It's not just the filter names. Their UI also looks identical to Instagram.

Why are they copying Instagram 1:1 when the Instagram UX sucks so much?

Instagram's UX sucks because of all the ads they stuffed it with in the last few years, not because of interface troubles.

I dunno. It’s kinda crummy in some ways. Maybe because I’m not a streets ahead kid with friends to teach me all the ways of the Instagram? Off the top of my head:

- you’re supposed to know that various edge swipes get you things

- I have two feeds apparently? There’s the home page and the middle bottom button

- you can’t do most things to an existing video, you must record it live, in Instagram, for most of the effects (eg. my kids did a hilarious Christmas morning dance and I realized it would be a good Boomerang)

- I’ve had multiple comedians DM me and then say “sorry I meant to reply to the comment!”

- beware that adding comments to those videos at the top are actually DMs

- almost every video cuts off 1 second early

- almost every video has been cropped to fit the aesthetics of my tall screen so I can’t even read the

All of your complaints are about the Reels offering, which isn't what Pixelfed cloned.

I don't think it does. You may be looking at some old screenshots I guess.

the same reason that chrome and firefox look like each other way more than they did originally

the same reason GNU/Linux distributions like Xandros used to mimic Windows XP

the same reason Microsoft Windows originally looked a lot like MacOS

the same reason MacOS looked a lot like what was going on in PARC before them

because users come to your platform with expectations and perceived affordances, and if you can get them to switch others will too

if your UI isn't defined by lawyers, it will adapt to the psychological models that actually live in the heads of your users if you're developing it properly

Shouldn't they need to trademark the filter names? Would copyright cover names?

Yeah, I heard it was about the filter names, but previously had no idea what those filter names actually were. If they're common, obvious names like "blur" and "enhance", then I doubt Instagram would have a case, but if they're really the same as Instagram's, and Instagram's filters are indeed those on https://picturepan2.github.io/instagram.css/ , and those names originated with Instagram, then Pixelfed needs to come up with some good names of their own, and fast.

I'm a big fan of all the open source Fediverse platforms, but copying these sort of unique names is rather obviously a bad idea.

There is this additional post:

“Someone who works at Meta reached out and advised me to rename the filters asap.” [1]

So maybe the issue is simply that Pixelfed is using identical filter names.

[1] https://mastodon.social/@dansup/109596825332511647

Never heard of Pixelfed, but it's sort of shady that, the moment they received notice that they shouldn't be copying a trillion-dollar company's product 1:1, they immediately cry that they need more donations.

Just rename the filters, and maybe make tweaks so they aren't exactly the same, and then suddenly Meta has no standing.

> Never heard of Pixelfed,

You may not have but that community is actually very active. I posted 5-6 photos on pixelfed and it had more engagement than my total Instagram engagement over 5-6 years.

I don't doubt it. I just wanted to specify that I've had no prior bias one way or another with regard to the service.

Lol, it's federated, you don't post "on Pixelfed" you post on whatever host you're on and maybe that host is federated to lively other hosts

This doesn't feel like a helpful response.

I understand that pixelfed is federated, but I still knew exactly what the commenter meant when they said they posted "on pixelfed". They meant they posted on an instance running the pixelfed software.

It seems like it was effective communication to me, and your correction seems both dismissive and unhelpful.

Yea. And you’re not “on the internet”. It’s a series of nodes that talk with each other and route requests between them. /s

There is no strict technical definition of “on” in this case.

Well. The fact that there is way less photographers on it may help.

Your insta is probably shadowbanned (or whatever nonesensical synonym they’re using nowadays to describe shadowbanning style moderation).

You’ve heard of them now :)

Good for them to call out bullying to spread awareness of their product.

Bullying? Really?

I like how you call this bullying, when all they did was rip off another company's product interface 1:1 and then cried foul when they got called on it. Imagine it were reversed. If a large and well financed corp released a product that was an exact copy of a small company's product, you'd blame the bigCorp for stealing the work and using their industry position to annihilate the small company.

Then again, I guess nobody gets fired for bashing Meta. (In this one case, I'm actually on Meta's side. Might be a second time for me)

i mean there are thousand of small photo sharing apps, and instagram was hardly the first... Naming the filters the same seems a bit stupid though...

Yea. That’s the part that is ripped. Making a new photo sharing app shouldn’t be controversial.

I like Pixelfed, but it was naive to rip the filter names and think that was somehow ok. It was also a totally unnecessary thing to copy. An imitation filter could be called anything and people will be able to tell (assuming you did a good enough job imitating).

how is an open source project asking for donations "shady" ? Is my money going to go to some nefarious ends?

This is Hacker News. OSS is supposed to be a good thing.

I just gave them $50, support creators, especially here where we are all benefiting as creators ourselves.

The shady part to me is Pixelfed vaguely mentions that Meta is "threatening legal action," and then they ask for money immediately after. This paints a David and Goliath tale, where Instagram sees a small startup taking away their users, and is trying to sue them into oblivion, and our donations will directly help. Instead, a later follow-up posts reveals "Well it's just due to the filter names."

I'm sure Pixelfed is a much better alternative to Instagram (I use neither), but the immediate segue from "Meta is threatening legal action" to "Please donate" implies that donations will be used to cover legal costs, when it sounds like the problem is pretty easily solved.

If you run an open-source project funded by donations, it is ok to ask for them every time you get any publicity. There is nothing shady about that.

Well, with a multi-billion dollar company knocking on the door, they know they may need absurd amounts of money for lawyers, so it makes sense to ask for donations should the situation escalate beyond what pro-bono lawyers can handle.

At the core, the problem is that the US doesn't have many protections for individuals and small businesses that need to fight against mega-corporations. It's simply infeasible to achieve anything outside of small-claims court. Europe is a bit better, but not by much.

If I were a small open source project with the prospect of a legal battle on the horizon, I’d want to start raising money for it before, not after, the litigation begins.

It appears that in this case, litigation is avoidable. The project would be purposely engaging in a legal battle at their communities dime over some names.

I would be very surprised if you could guarantee that a litigious entity will not sue on any grounds. I don't think think removing the obvious reason to sue is sufficient protection from the possibility of a lawsuit.

Or maybe it's a good thing that they are standing up to a 'trillion dollar company'. More people should be doing this.

Seems that they have done just that.

https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/pull/4037

This sounds so stupid. Imagine if the inventor of first button had sued others for copying shape and it's shadow

That would be as silly as a computer company getting a patent for a rectangle with rounded corners.

I mean at least Meta chose incredibly original filter names, such as

Juno, the ancient Roman goddess, a word in use for over 2000 years.

Clarendon, the wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarendon lists approximately 40+ different uses, from place names to typefaces.

Lark, well, do I have to add anything here?

Ludwig, uhmmm, Beethoven's estate is about to be sued?

Lo-fi: Yes I never heard of this word before in the context of photography. True originators.

Please stop the trademarking of common words and cultural heritage that belong to all of us.

If they both had a filter named Lo-Fi you’d have a point. Having all the same names makes this very obviously just plagiarism.

You can say the same for Apple. I think the trademark applies when a common word is used in a distinct business case. Here the word is used as a filter name, for instance. That application is unique.

A trademark isn't "you don't get to use this word because I own it now", it is "you don't get to use this word in this context as it is confusing". If you want to name your restaurant Ludwig, go ahead: you just can't name your filter Ludwig. With the exception of Lo-Fi, where maybe you could make a defense, these names are non-obvious and have never been in common use to describe a set of modifications to photographs. Just because Clarendon isn't a unique word does NOT have ANYTHING to do with whether or not you could trademark it for something.

You can't just say "durrrr... I've heard this word before!" you have to actually show that that word has been connected to that context and isn't some otherwise unique usage, and I simply don't see how you are going to claim that for these words: if you show those filters to people and ask them to describe them, the only reason they would say "Clarendon" is because of Instagram's prior usage carefully associating that word with that filter behavior: if you believe otherwise you have to show THAT, not that the word itself has been uttered by someone in the past.

Indeed. Microsoft Windows and those holes in your wall have coexisted for decades without any trouble. (Not so for Mike Rowe's software company, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_v._MikeRoweSoft)

Why is it confusing to use “Ludwig” as a filter? Nobody is going to get confused what site they are on based on the name of a filter. In fact, it’s less confusing than having to rename filters for each product.

I get that it's about context. But to me this is meaningless, why should any company be able to restrict the usage of common words in a business context?

As a sidenote, Lo-fi has definitely been used in the context of photography before Meta decided to use it as a filter.

I’m afraid you may have some misapprehensions about how trademarks work, and I don’t think this is about trademark specifically anyway.

Trademarks do not give someone the exclusive rights to that word in all contexts. Instead, you register a word or phrase and an category. For instance, there are about 1500 trademarks on the word Apple, from laundromats to eyeglasses[0]

But Meta’s complaint here doesn’t seem to be trademark; companies don’t typically trademark every name like filters. But there is lots of other IP law, including trade dress, which is different from trademark.

And much as I love the fediverse and hope it displaces dinosaurs like Meta, I’m surprised anyone would defending taking the filter names em mass and using them to refer to the same visual effects. That is not something one does. Meta is not claiming ownership of all uses of those words in any context, they are saying please don’t rip off the exact words to clone their UX.

[0] https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=toc&state=4802%3A...

What are the names of the filters? I’m not familiar with either app and the commit “renaming” them only inserts the letter `i` in a UI template.

This person submitted a pull request to actually-rename them, which conveniently shows the full list: https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/pull/4038/files

Thanks. From Supernault’s framing I’d expected generic terms like sepia, grayscale, invert, etc. but actually they’ve reproduced forty arbitrary, artsy words that sound like they could have come from a fashion brand name generator. Hard to see that as “being sued over css”.

That happen to exactly match Meta’s arbitrary list of artsy words. Clearly, they copied the names.

That's one of the funniest things I've seen this month, I had no idea this existed. Making it such a carbon copy yet with a federated backend is something that both feels like a huge feat and something like an amusingly naive oversight.

Honestly impressed as can be but can certainly see that they could have at least tried to differentiate it from its inspiration at least somewhat, like that's just poking bears in eyes with sticks.

https://w1.pixelcdn.net/assets/images/pixelfed-app-feed.png

Well the UI looks exactly like Instagram

Does it? It looks like a generic photo sharing app to me. The iconography is different, the UI controls in the top are different and the list of faces at the top of the page are gone. The only matching icons I can see are the heart shape (hardly original) and the speech bubble for commenting (also hardly original).

For a company shamelessly copying from other apps, it's quite silly for Instagram to send a cease and desist letter to Pixelfed.

> It looks like a generic photo sharing app to me.

Is this the tech version of the Seinfeld Effect?

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...

> The only matching icons I can see are the heart shape (hardly original) and the speech bubble for commenting (also hardly original).

Nearly everything I’m seeing was pretty clearly cribbed from IG‘s UI throughout the years.

You can see more similarities in this 2016 screenshot: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/05/11/instagram-redesigns...

And their use of the navigator icon for discover is also a play on an even older IG interface. Dunno if it’s enough for a suit but it’s pretty, uh, direct.

> Nearly everything I’m seeing was pretty clearly cribbed from IG‘s UI throughout the years.

It's a little rich for Instagram to complain about UX theft, given Stories (Snapchat) and Reels (TikTok).

> And their use of the navigator icon for discover is also a play on an even older IG interface.

You mean the Safari icon, that is just a picture of a compass? Not sure Instagram can lay claim to that.

Funny, considering how instagram just straight up ripped-off tik tok with instagram reels.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think stories was a snapchat feature originally.

Rather shamelessly in fact. They did copy the infinite video scroll from TikTok, among other things.

Isn’t that just a different form factor for Instagram? They already had an infinite feed of content, many of which videos; TikTok made it full screen

Tiktok's UI choices (auto-play, full screen video, default feed, swipe instead of scroll, etc.) were distinctive enough to be considered something novel.

Reels are different from Stories, but yes, both features were copied from TikTok and Snapchat.

Not originally. Korean social media apps had them before snapchat.

Vine was around for quite a while too. well, 2013-2016 at least.

I wonder if this was just lazy MVP development or a conscious strategy to get attention. I never would have heard of them without this controversy, and it's something very cheap for them to fix (just rename). Probably need to attract more than just HN, but if they can somehow turn this into a few mainstream press articles about "tiny Mastodon photo service attacked by Mark Zuckerberg, personally!", it's a win, especially since the remedy is renaming an internal product feature where the names themselves aren't even significant. (Probably doing a "community poll to come up with new names" would be a worthwhile growth hack, too.)

.. if this only about renaming filter names .. I do not get why pixelfeed made it an issue to even publish. I despise meta as much as anyone - but there was zero need for a shit post.

Does anybody have more information? This is quite sparse.

Instagram didn't mind copying Snap and beReal.

Is anyone still using filters on photo nowadays? Apart from the occasionnal black&white all make the pictures crappier anyway.

More speculation—Pixelfed’s new app icon is an imitation of Instagram’s:

https://mstdn.social/@cyhwuhx/109597713552140253

I think Instagram has been super gracious here. I visited their site and it’s literally a 1:1 clone.

It’s not in defence of Meta but defence of the open source movement. Projects like this paint open source in the wrong light. An open source photo sharing up would have been cool but 1:1 clones are just unimaginative.

Pixelfed will be changing the filter names: https://mastodon.social/@dansup/109605006708970886

Anyone else not enjoy mastodons UI? Sidebar is a waste of space

Yep, the basic web UI is a bit weird. However, if you go into preferences and enable the "Advanced web interface" option, it turns into a cool, Tweetdeck-like interface with customizable columns.

The basic UI always surprises me whenever I open a new mastodon account, and then I always forget about it. :)

People in this thread seem to be confusing copying an idea vs. copying actual IP.

There is nothing stopping anyone from creating a TikTok clone, but there sure as hell are laws stopping anyone from directly ripping the UI (which Pixelfed did in this case).

> from creating a TikTok clone, but there sure as hell are laws stopping anyone from directly ripping the UI

This is contradictory.

It's really not.

Both aren't the problem here though.

Pixelfed used the exact same list of filter-names (image effects) as Instagram. Which is probably an oversight - I'd imagine its even a copy-paste from some hackernews/opensource/tutorial.

Neither the UI was ripped, nor the implementation cloned. It's all about the names used in a feature.

Read my original post.

> copying actual IP.

This is exactly the problem they're facing.

PS; labels & text are part of the UI.

> vs. copying actual IP.

there is no "actual IP", just copyright, trademarks, user interface design elements, software patents and so on.

Is it because of the filters?

I had no idea people still used filters on instagram.

Just change your mobile UI from being a carbon copy to something original? They even copied the names of the filters. A cease and desist seems justified.

If I post something to Instagram, then I delete it, or make my profile private, will it remain available on Pixelfed? IMO, this should be the litmus test for fair use of social networks by third-party clients.

Pixelfed does not source data from Instagram.

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