Hacking Instagram: release your photos under Creative Commons | Hacker News Reader

Hacking Instagram: release your photos under Creative Commons

i-am-cc.org

46 pointsphilipn20 comments

How exactly is this hacking instagram? Isn't this just republishing instagram photos?

I presume the facebook licensing allows third parties to republish content uploaded to their servers.

I hate to sound cynical, but does the world really need more ways to share the plethora of crappy photos that is instagram?

It's a hack because Instagram doesn't give you an option to license under CC in their interface, and it's doubtful they will, now that they're owned by FB. CC licensing on Flickr has had a huge impact on the free culture movement, and it'd be great to see something like that happen with Instagram, which is now (I assume) orders of magnitude more popular.

The way the default licensing on Instagram works is: you hold copyright and Instagram has a non-exclusive right to use them in some ways. It doesn't permit usage outside of that. So if you wanted to use an image on your blog or in a Wikipedia article you'd be out of luck (or maybe just get lucky and not get in any trouble).

Nice work. A good idea. FB is looking to profit from UGC. UGC mean User Generated Content in case you are not familiar all the acronyms. You send them _your_ stuff and they use it to make money but restrict others from using it. They do this with a silly license thanno one reads. So use the CC license instead. If you are into "sharing", then CC is the better choice. If you want to enrich FB, then I guess keep agreeing to FB's license.

Truly, they are _your_ photos, not FB's, and you can license them any way you want. The CC license is there because people generally do not write up their own licenses. How many people even truly understand copyright? Most lawyers I know do not even fully understand it. Nothing is to say you can't draw up your own license though. One of my favorites is the "Do Whatever the Fuck You Want License". It is one line: Do whatever the fuck you want. Beautiful.

Another one I like is the "non-license". It's two words: Public domain.

This is the web. Everything gets copied. And licenses are just words. What matters really is whether someone is going to sue you. A license can make that easier or harder to do. But the truth is, if someone really wants to sue you, if you are in the US, they can. License or no license. Whether the suit goes forward is another matter. Still, getting sued is a hassle, even if the suit is baseless. (A strategy is born. Eureka.)

Apologies for the profanity.

Do you really hate to sound cynical? Really?

The "Hacking Instagram" headline caught my eye. Not exactly related, but I also "Hacked Instagram" to add a whole bunch of new photo sharing options to the official Android Instagram App. There's no official way to add plugins, so I did it the hard way by having my app spawn Instagram and then monitor user-interactions within the app. When I detect a photo is ready, I bring up my sharing option menu so the user can send the photo via email, SMS, dropbox, Google+ etc, etc. It's a hack for sure, but was interesting to write:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.houseblend...

I'm a little slow today. Does this actually utilize an Instagram API to change the license on their side? If so I'm curious as to what the API call is as I believe it's undocumented.

Great work, incredible idea and very functional MVP. Perhaps you can consider integrating IFTTT to make it even easier to share?

You need a marketing campaign around the concept.

Good luck!

Cool, I signed up. One thing to consider though would be to allow at some point different licenses for different images. I just inadvertently licensed some pictures of my daughter as attrib-share-alike. Admittedly my mistake, but it would be nice to have a way to have quickly corrected this since there seems to be no way to exclude any images.

Yeah, very good point. I'll add that in next. I just went with a simple date range because I wasn't sure how many API calls were really allowed -- it isn't clear if it's 5000 per-client per-day, or 5000 per-token per-day.

This is awesome Philip. I'd love the ability to tag my photos as right now they aren't easily searchable for people.

Yeah, I'm saving tags and all the other metadata like location in the DB. It's exposed via the API right now. It'll get added in to the UI sometime next week, hopefully.

> I just inadvertently licensed some pictures of my daughter

better find a way to undo that https://thispicturesucks.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/creative-c...

Seems like a great idea with a noble cause. I wonder if you will struggle to get people to signup though - perhaps you could appeal to people's vanity more and tell them they'll get more followers by signing up to CC. ;-)

Or (perhaps more realistically :) point out that you're more likely to have other people use your photos if you publish them with a license instead of making people contact you about rights.

Signed up and released my old photos too!

http://i-am-cc.org/instagram/ramakanth_d

Fantastic work!

Wish Instagram had offered this option from their launch. Imagine how many great photos we would now have in the commons .

Which CC license is being adopted?

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

You can pick the licensing terms you prefer. Did you even look at the submitted URL? Each picture on the site shows its licensing terms underneath using icons.

Yeah, totally spaced on the badges. Thanks for pointing them out :)

Great work, Philip.

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