Instagram's official response
blog.instagram.com
blog.instagram.com
However, judging from the responses here, a lot of Instagram users are unappeasable, and I don't think unreasonably. Their motives are basically unknowable by anyone not in their inner circle, so all we have to go on is their actions and their words. If your internal heuristics say that when it looks like a social media company is trying to steal your personal data/intellectual property, they probably are and will then lie about it after the fact... well, that seems like a reasonable heuristic to have this day and age. I'm not sure I buy into it unreservedly, but I wouldn't try to convince anyone they're wrong about it, either.
This whole event shows me (or at least, reminds me) that there are limits to what words can fix.
The product manager failed here, not the lawyers.
If a lawyer's advice pisses off your users, that isn't a good lawyer. Sure a lawyer can claim that being "conservative" on behalf of their "client's interests" is the best way to act.
That's no longer credible though. The client (Instagram's) interests can be more closely linked now to their user's interests, than was the case before the Internet when a company could write whatever shit they like in legal agreements, and nobody would complain.
Sorry, but under universally-accepted legal ethics standards going back centuries, that's not at all how it works.
Lawyers advise, as you say, but ultimately, the client's business people make the call. Sometimes a lawyer will tell a client, "sure, legally you can do this, but you need to be prepared for some significant blow-back," and then the business people decide they'll take that risk. That decision is entirely within the province of the business people; not only can the lawyer do nothing about it, she must remain silent to the outside world about it except in extremely-narrow circumstances.
Few would have it otherwise. Even when we're talking about a public company, few shareholders, let alone managers, would want the company's lawyers --- who typically have never had much first-hand business experience, let alone P&L responsibility --- to be able to overrule a decision by the business people about business issues.
I understand they need to monetize (god, it's taken HOW LONG!?!? Jesus!), but that doesn't excuse them from intellectual dishonesty. People have genuine concerns and they should be addressed clearly.
I think the market would simply be happy with a 'Creative Commons' default option tbh (like deviantart, flickr etc) with an account or picture level opt-out. Really simple, just put a cherry on this crap. Somewhere.
I thought, "We run a business," was a blanket excuse for intellectual dishonesty in general.
So, uh, what are you doing on a site dedicated in no small part to startups? Are you calling all of us who run businesses intellectually dishonest?
That's why his comment about "running a business" being a "blanket excuse for intellectual dishonesty in general." seemed offensive to me, as it paints a lot of people with a very broad brush. It seems like the kind of one-liner point scoring one finds on, ahem, other unnamed sites.
Like it or not, we live in a society where "because money" is a reasonable justification for a huge number of otherwise disgusting actions. Acknowledging that not does not imply that if your goal is to make money, you have to do such things.
For instance, they say "The language we proposed also raised question about whether your photos can be part of an advertisement." No, the language they proposed clearly said that was something they could do: "you agree that a business may pay us to display your photos in connection with paid content." (paraphrased) Or the bit about "you own your photos and that hasn't changed". True, but that's not what people were complaining about. They were complaining about how it says "you own your photos but you grant us the rights to do anything with them up to selling them." Instagram just saying "you own your photos" back is meaningless as a response and sounds like they think we are just stupid.
(My source for the original complaints: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/17/instagrams-terms-of...)
I think it should show you that there are limits to what people will understand.
This is an APOLOGY from Instagram. It cannot be construed as anything more than a PR Document.
However: their TERMS OF SERVICE are a REAL CONTRACT. Whatever they say about the contract is one thing - once you agree to that contract in a legally binding way, however: thats another thing entirely.
What this should be showing you in all your fascination is how easily people can be duped into thinking that "their company" is 'friendly' after a few pages of words are dumped out into the mob-o-sphere .. and beyond that, it should show you that PR often trumps LEGAL in the public mind -but never in the civic one.
I think it's amusing that Instagram is, in its own words, "trying to build a viable business", just a few weeks after they sold for a billion.
In short: Instagram is a fun site for sharing silly photos.
Facebook vastly overpaid for it, and the pedantic hacker types on HN and Slashdot vastly overestimate the importance of its new terms.
Putting the promise in the actual TOS is much more believable than putting it in a blog post.
Next time read the ToS of every service you use, and feel free to get angry at every single one of them.
They ask for a license to store, display and publish your content, but this is explicitly limited to the use of operating the service. They need that license so that some user does not sue them for copyright infringement after uploading their own pictures and clicking "share".
Instagram/Facebook take a much broader license, which includes sub-licensing rights to third parties, including for profit and unrelated to the operation of Instagram itself.
Note, getting angry? that is what changes this sort of thing.
Seriously, setting up a ToS is a pain in the ass. If someone that understands the business and the customer isn't involved, if you throw it over the fence to the lawyers, and you don't read it like a user would, this is what it ends up looking like. Hammering out a good ToS is really hard, and it requires effort of someone that cares about the reputation of the company, /and/ hasn't drank so much company kool-aide that they understand that users don't always assume good faith.
These people are harder to find than lawyers. So yeah, setting up a good ToS is hard.
If customers just 'click through' and don't care what the ToS says? guess what businesses are going to do? we are going to throw it over the fence to the lawyers, who are going to write something like this, if they think the VC is their client.
Getting angry is really important, because it's the only way to convince companies to put the effort in to writing a good ToS.
"The language we proposed also raised question about whether your photos can be part of an advertisement. We do not have plans for anything like this and because of that we’re going to remove the language that raised the question."
I think they deserve a little patience and a chance to follow through with their promise. When they do, we can see how villainous the terms still are. And if they don't keep their promise, we can call them on it.
I don't. This message from on high wasn't particularly bad for a startup, but there are plenty of internet "lifestyle businesses" that can communicate with their user base much much better. The guys who accidentally turn their hobby projects into a small, sustainable business for themselves talk to their userbase with a level of candidness that you'll never see from startup guys, so don't piss on my leg and tell me its raining.
I can imagine a better explanation from instagam easily. It wouldn't start with "Legal documents are easy to misinterpret", it would start with "It's no secret that lawyers will write contract terms as strongly in our favor as possible in a general cover-your-ass measure. Even though we don't plan to do the thing you're all so pissed off about, we sure had them write the terms in a way that gives us room to change our minds in future and actually do most of what you are worried about."
Actually, I guess I can't imagine that. They don't have the balls to admit that. They did the standard lawyer-over-the-shoulder thing of calling it all this big misunderstanding, and we really should have just trusted them to be more benevolent all along.
Like..?
> The guys who accidentally turn their hobby projects into a small, sustainable business for themselves talk to their userbase with a level of candidness that you'll never see from startup guys
I'd really like to know which, so I can learn from them.
It's actions that define an individual or an organisation, and not words. Better would've been an unambiguous policy update that clearly quells people's concerns, without the feel-good corporate messaging.
Trust is easily given, sometimes earned. It is also easily lost, and very hard to re-earn.
Their app is symptomatic of an immature industry in which trivial/fun apps far outnumber and precede useful business/productivity apps. An app in the former category with a cavalier attitude to its users will be dropped first, given the arrival of a worthwhile replacement.
> Like..?
MetaFilter [1] does an excellent job of owner-moderator-user interaction. Here are some key features:
* Because of the size of the site, they don't have to rely on community moderation - and the moderators they do have do a very patient and professional job. You don't get capricious or childish deletions, you get the feeling moderators think carefully before deleting posts, and they're always willing to explain their decisions. There's nothing like wheel wars or moderators trying to kick out other moderators.
* There's a $5 signup fee so regular bans work - no need for things like hell bans/shadow bans.
* There's a section of the site called 'metatalk' [2] where things like policies, bugs, moderator actions etc can be discussed. Metatalk posts tend to get read by mods pretty quickly; the top post there has a reply from the site's main developer within 2 minutes.
* Between Metatalk and the mods chatting in the site's normal threads, people feel they know the moderators [3]. Matt, the site's owner, seems like a reasonable guy.
As such, people are much less worried that the site's owners are trying to fuck them over - because the site's owners have an established history of not doing that.
[1] http://metafilter.com/ [2] http://metatalk.metafilter.com/ [3] http://metatalk.metafilter.com/17338/Does-MeFi-have-a-privac...
Pinboard is a great example http://pinboard.in/
It's like 343 industries telling users that they didn't receive emails because they had invalid email addresses on their Xbox accounts (which is impossible)...
Weasel words. What's so hard about saying "we wont sell your photos, promise, fingers crossed", unless they actually do want to keep that option open.
I imagine a rock solid guarantee that users photos wont be used without their consent would go a very long way in appeasing people.
"If your internal heuristics say..."
No, when the company TOS say they will appropriate my property for their financial benefit, it is reasonable to assume that they may in fact act accordingly.
The right words can and do go a long way in rectifying mistakes. Weasel words that create even more uncertainty and appear to be hiding an agenda tend to infuriate people.
I've been involved in writing Terms of Service for a few big web sites. The back and forth with the lawyers is of course frustrating. And at the end of the day, you have something that comes off overly broad just to "cover everyones asses" from some future theoretical lawsuit.
So even though the TOS allows it, it was not their intention to actually do it. They're going to go back and revise the wording to be what they actually do intend.
Great apology.
I am always on the lookout for weasel words too, don't get me wrong. The "I am sorry that anyone was offended" apology always rubs me the wrong way, cause the person saying that is not sorry for saying it and doesn't regret saying it, but just sorry for offending. But this apology comes off to me as genuine.
This is what's hard about it: The second they sign any kind of commercial agreement for money, no matter what you and I consider "selling", hundreds of litigious a-holes (pardon my french, but I do believe that's the correct description) with their eyes firmly fixed to Facebooks market cap, will decide that today is a great day to get some courts to decide what exactly the words "we", "won't", "sell", "your" and "photos" means. And even if they win (not that there are any winners in such a case), the same thing will happen again the next time they do such an agreement.
It remains to be seen how well they've really listened when they put up their next attempt at writing "easy to misinterpret legal documents".
And after that, the next TOS change, and the next one after that ...
As many stated, the document was not unclear or misinterpreted, it was very explicit.
Now they say they don't want to sell your pictures and will change their ToS to make it clearer. Since it was already clear, the conclusion I made, is that they'll just try hiding those "unclear" statements better.
Hope not, but I don't think they'll give up that "right" so easily.
While under oath, Kevin Systrom: “No, we never received any offers,”
Reality, Instagram had an offer from Twitter and Kevin Systrom had direct knowledge.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/disruptions-instagr...
That said, at least it looks like they're going to tweak the TOS change in favor of their users. But with Facebook pulling the reigns, we all know where this will end.
> The language we proposed also raised question about whether your photos can be part of an advertisement. We do not have plans for anything like this and because of that we’re going to remove the language that raised the question.
Note that he doesn't say "we won't use your photos as part of an advertisement", he merely says "the reason we're removing that language is because we don't [currently] plan on using your photos as part of an advertisement".
I'm sure if they thought of a way they could make money by doing so without losing critical mass, they'd be all over that.
It isn't off-topic because it is a direct response to it's parent who was trying to make a point by example that refers to this use of rhetoric
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question
It isn't offensive because it is simply using the loaded question to provide a loaded answer that uses the exact same rhetorical trick to turn the tables. To try to show by example that the point being made is little more than a trick.
It is the nature of a loaded question with an obvious appeal to emotion that makes responses to it seem offensive.
This would neither necessarily fit into the classification of 'advertising', nor be showing photos to 'your friends', who would immediately call this kind of behaviour out. This would sorta tally with the fact that photos are public by default AFAIK, and the comments about privacy.
Hopefully irrelevant, but just a thought.
The new TOS actually limits what they an do more than the old one.
Stop trying to cast a simple snafu regarding a ToS as some evil conspiracy.
Remember that the people running this company are you peers. It's disgusting watching the community salivating over burning them all at the stake today.
They're your friends, or just like your friends. Knock it off.
See also: Banking.
My peers and friends at least would never use my pictures to create ads and in any case, my relations to peer and friends are not based on comprehensive and one-sided ToS …
edit: give me a $1
It's a classic move from the Facebook playbook. Push out a far-reaching privacy policy or feature update. Release a message or press release saying that "we're listening". Make token changes and say "we've listened and made changes". And just in case people start to sue, vigorously lobby and donate to government officials to keep the regulatory heat off their backs.
They are trying to get away with as much as they can. These stupid companies are going to be the reason why 10 years from now the Internet is going to be a morass of government regulation.
Don't work for or support companies that act like this. Shame on them. Period.
I wouldn't be surprised if at some point soon you won't be able to register a domain name or start an Internet company without taking a licensing exam.
Who would impose such a requirement of licensure? Certainly not the government --- that would be a prior restraint on freedom of speech/press and therefore unconstitutional.
No one tried to cast this as a conspiracy, they simply called it what it is, a company monetizing by making the user experience worse.
"Remember that the people running this company are you peers. It's disgusting watching the community salivating over burning them all at the stake today."
I don't know whats craziest here. First, equating "burning them at the stake" to "deleting their accounts on that persons website" is absolute lunacy and I don't know how anyone could take your points seriously. Second, pretending that because these people look like my friends, they should get a free pass on changing their terms to better monetize user content is just lame, just because someone looks like me and is a millionaire doesn't make them immune to incredibly correct criticism.
That said, sounds like people aren't willing to "agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you."
I can't believe that people just expect everything to come to them for free.
Well, when you create the expectation, as Instagram did, that things will come for free, and then you stop fulfilling that expectation, customers will leave. Not sure how long it will take startup founders to understand and it blows my mind how frequently people on HN seem to act like people "owe" a site something for the service they're providing. If I get an invite to your free photosharing site with features X, Y and Z, you're creating an expectation. If you change your offering once you get a ton of users in the hopes of monetizing them, you're changing the offering and these people leaving is justified. The reason they got there in the first place was because of your offering, which you're now changing.
If we take your words as gospel, then we should be critical of them and we should take action.
This is also because Instagram as a business is not a peer, does not follow advice, and absolutely needs to be burnt at the stake (and salivated over?) to realise it made a mistake.
-- If not in jest, this is rediculously naive. just FYI.
Our "friends" over there sure didn't go out of their way to call out an important change in the TOS. If it wasn't an attempt to sneak this by, it's indistinguishable from one.
I think the fears are really overblown: http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/18/3780158/instagrams-new-te...
Look at the former section "Proprietary Rights in Content on Instagram"
> Instagram does NOT claim ANY ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, applications, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you post on or through the Instagram Services. By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the Instagram Services, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels, except Content not shared publicly ("private") will not be distributed outside the Instagram Services.
This section about copyright has turned into something pretty much like Facebook's:
> Instagram does not claim ownership of any Content that you post on or through the Service. Instead, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post on or through the Service, except that you can control who can view certain of your Content and activities on the Service as described in the Service's Privacy Policy, available here:http://instagram.com/legal/privacy/.
A reply from the author of the article in the comments[0]:
> You guys know that I used to be a copyright lawyer, right? This stuff is all boilerplate terms of service — every service from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, etc all have it.
0: http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/18/3780158/instagrams-new-te...
As you can see, the new Instagram © license is like Facebook's or Twitter's. But very different from others. (Actually, the current Instagram © license is okay)
I'd very much like to see how he responds.
What are you talking about? Have you read their ethics statement[0] yet?
In the world of journalism, that's a very serious accusation to be making without any evidence.
You might want to read the link you posted.
> Our company has its own advertising team responsible for selling ad space on our site. We do not accept money or other consideration from companies as a condition or incentive to write a review or story, whether favorable or unfavorable, on The Verge.
> We do not invest in companies that we cover, and employees are forbidden from owning, trading, or buying stock in companies we cover or companies in the general tech sector, without exception.
> We don't take free things from companies, or from their PR firms. This rule is simple and we stick to it
> We do not take free or discounted merchandise
> We do not take free or discounted services.
> Employees of The Verge may not be otherwise employed by or receive compensation from companies that they are likely to cover as part of their news beat, nor are they permitted to have any advisory role (paid or unpaid) at those companies.
> We do not accept any samples on any preconditions, such as, that we will agree to provide a review simply because the company sent us a sample.
> This stuff is all boilerplate terms of service — every service from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, etc all have it.
>"Ownership Rights: Instagram users own their content and Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos. Nothing about this has changed. We respect that there are creative artists and hobbyists alike that pour their heart into creating beautiful photos, and we respect that your photos are your photos. Period. I always want you to feel comfortable sharing your photos on Instagram and we will always work hard to foster and respect our community and go out of our way to support its rights."
He should add in brackets that the user has automatically given Instagram "Ownership" of a gold plated license to do whatever the hell it wants with content posted, in case anyone was wondering.
It can mean that they cannot re-license your work, which is to say you wouldn't have to compete with them in terms of pricing to a third party but I don't know if that is what the ToS says so a closer reading is in order.
So I would say "sub-license" means "re-license". It would be very unfortunate to have to compete with Instagram on pricing for your own content to a third party. Or some company that buys Instagram/Facebook out.
Just read this bit: "To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear."
So I think that clears up the 'sub-licensable' aspect. It doesn't rule out giving them away for free - which come to think of it, would hard to compete with price-wise! I'm really starting to wonder what they had in mind.
This TOS tweak allows Instagram go sell your content for advertising purposes to a third party. They can use your images, as is, in their advertising(presumably on Instagram, though that is not clear). So they can take payment for your content, without compensating you at all.
That's a pretty huge difference from Facebook's TOS. In there, they state that they will use your content to deliver ads. They're not delivering your content to other parties to be used in their ad campaign.
"That effectively guts the user's control over the use and exploitation of the photo," says Daniel Schaeffer, an attorney with Neal & McDevitt, a boutique law firm in Northfield, Ill., specializing in intellectual property. "The most obvious and immediate example is the ability to allow businesses to use your photos in advertising, but the actual effects could be even farther-reaching."
FWIW, the author of the Verge post I linked, managing editor Nilay Patel, also holds a law degree, and previously worked as a copyright attorney.
As I explained to someone else in another comment[0], I suggest you not embarrass yourself any further by making baseless accusations about journalists who take impartiality very seriously.
> What's your point?
That the OP's link's author's professional qualifications are also possessed by the author of the post I linked, making that a moot factor.
I have no reason at this point to doubt his judgment, as he is clearly quite a capable individual, as he has managed to become the managing editor of one of the top tech news sites in an industry bursting with competition and upstarts.
Verbal contracts are still contracts. Written form is preferred because it's easier to enforce after-the-fact, not because it's required for legal contracts.
And either way, Systrom would have taken an oath to "tell the truth, and the whole truth". This type of glaring omission over quibbling about whether an offer was a "formal" offer or not would get most in trouble with the courts...
Can you at least read the article before talking about generalities of mergers&acquisitions?
You know - just like the terms and conditions.
"Legal documents are easy to misinterpret. So I’d like to address specific concerns we’ve heard from everyone"
My understanding is that legal documents are written precisely to be as hard to misinterpret as possible. They say exactly what they mean, and (subject to possible judicial interpretation) mean exactly what they say.
I'm sure the average layperson might misunderstand or not realise the consequences or scope of a particular term, but as I understand it, the original concerns appear to have been raised by an EFF lawyer[1] who presumably does have a reasonable grasp of the matter.
That sets the tone for the piece.
"Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation. This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing. To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos."
We are selling a package. Which might include some photos and some other advertising or whatever services, juicy user data, etc, but we're definitely not selling the photos. Only the package thing.
"Ownership Rights: Instagram users own their content and Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos."
My understanding is that this is irrelevant to everything except maybe attribution; they're granting themselves sufficient rights to transfer & sub-licence the works, which is essentially everything necessary to sell/use/licence a copy. In fact, the existence of a perpetual royalty-free transferable/re-licenceable licence will significantly devalue the content, if the actual owner wanted to sell or exclusively licence the content.
Maybe I'm reading it wrong. But it definitely feels like the Non-Apology-Apology "We're truly sorry that you feel upset about how we're trying to shaft you good & hard."
[1] mentioned in http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57559710-38/instagram-says... as Kurt Opsahl[2]
legal documents reuse diction that has been ruled on and has court established precedent, which creates a bias towards diction which ended up in court in the first place.
i read that in a HN comment somewhere, sorry, no citation.
There was an interesting controversy at Google about ownership of what you worked on in your own time, and their assertion that the carve out in California law about 'having to do with the business' basically covered everything because they were pretty much into everything.
If you read it in a strict legal sense, by signing the employment agreement you agreed to give Google a lifetime perpetual right to anything your worked on at any time during your employment with them. So a cry went up, and the official response was "You know what we meant, we aren't really claiming everything." So I said, "Ok, lets rewrite it then to say that you don't mean everything, you only mean things that are in businesses that Google is actively pursuing, and not things Google isn't pursuing." my intention was to align the legal text with the statement of their intention. Silence. Tried again. Silence. Eventually presented HR with a 'modified agreement' which had the new language, they refused to sign it. So I asked, which is it? To which they said "We stand by what we said, you are reading too much into this." And my lawyer said, "If I was a lawyer and had this on file and decided I really want to use whatever it was you were working on, this language clearly says you agree to them taking it from you without any compensation."
That was when I decided to leave.
I get that it is "simpler" and reduces the companies risk to have that language in there, after all it would be hugely painful to have to compensate someone more than they already did to use something that person wrote, and it keeps folks from creating a business "on the side" and then selling it back later, but there is what they say, and what they do. And what they will do. My lawyer once said, "If they say it doesn't mean that, then have them update it, if they won't then they do mean that, even if they don't want to say it."
A more likely explanation is that Legal didn't want to modify their very-expensively produced and widely-reviewed employment contract for some mere employee. And HR had you figured out as a troublemaker. :-)
If a lawyer is advising you that something is unenforceable, they're probably right.
I found it hard to argue with his logic.
If you add up the total number of people at Google who have complained about that rock, and the number of people who haven't but would if they were prompted, suddenly "too much trouble" looks a little different, IMHO.
Google has always insisted that it's only IP that's relevant to Google's business. Critics (such as myself) have always retorted that ANYTHING can be construed to be relevant to Google's business.
The only thing that's materially changed in response to complaints, is that there is now a review committee that you can submit projects to, and after some weeks they can grant you permission to keep the IP.
But if Google actually believes that your specific project is related to their business, you're not going to get an approval. For example, all applications for smartphones are explicitly blanket excluded.
Actually it depends on the circumstances. Sometimes you want to be precise and sometimes you want to be ambiguous depending on what you are trying to achieve.
Semi legal example: Let's say you are offering people email accounts with a web hosting service. You can be precise and say "you can have up to a million email accounts" or you can be less precise and say (believe it or not) "unlimited". If you say the latter you can then define imprecisely what you mean by "unlimited". If you specify a number you will box yourselves in. Same with customer support or a host of other things. Precision sometimes works against you. (Corrected I said the opposite before edit.)
Another example. Let's say you have a display of free utensils (plastic like at a fast food restaurant). You can say "take no more than 10 ketchup packs" and you will probably end up getting more waste then if you say nothing. In that case, precision works against you.
"Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation. This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing. To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos. [But these changes means we could if we wanted]"
"Ownership Rights: Instagram users own their content and Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos. [Not that it matters]"
It's all misdirection.
In this case, the issue is that legal documents are written to be as cover-your-ass as possible. Instagram needs a license for your content to show it on their site. Then a lawyer says "what if Facebook sells Instagram to someone else?". So they add a bit that makes it a transferable license. That was easy! But then someone who is not trying to cover Instagram's ass reads it and says "that means they can sell the rights to my photo." And that's true. It wasn't the intent of the lawyers but the lawyers really had no intent regarding protecting the user's rights. They're just watching out for Instagram.
Plus as other posters have pointed out there are some pretty clear giveaways in the Phrasing of some of the denials. In the very first paragraph is " Since making these changes, we’ve heard loud and clear that many users are confused and upset about what the changes mean...." Basically saying that our changes were not bad it is the users that are confused.
If you have not already --- ABANDON SHIP
It did the right thing responding so quickly to user feedback. Hopefully it'll result in a TOS that lets Instagram monetize without infringing on the privacy of its users.
And maybe just maybe they will review further TOS changes before unleashing them. If these terms were really against Instagram's plans, it's almost even more pathetic.
After reading some of the TOS changes and this blog post it really seems like a case of overzealous lawyering - trying to cover Instagram for all possible uses of the photos.
Not as Proper Noun Legal Advice, but more as a set of things which might be a concern, and you should have your own qualified legal counsel examine in detail if desired)
I can think of all sorts of problems though; malpractice, negligence, copyright infringement of ToS, libel for misinterpretations, and many more besides. Maybe that's why it doesn't (can't?) exist.
What I don't get is why Instagram doesn't just let users pay for the value they are obviously receiving from the service.
http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/your-cloud-data-not-your...
I think instagram/facebook should be able to monetize, but I think today marks a gigantic mistake in their history, they went down in myspace fashion. Users dropping like flies, the amount of traffic on services like instaport.me and http://freethephotos.com/ is phenemonal.
In other news, flickr came back from the grave.
And if you turn out to be a hit they can use it to sell the pizza to everyone not just your friends.
And if you're really a hit, they can use it to sell underwear. Or adult diapers. Or contraceptives. Or whatever you might not like them to use your imagery to sell.
But what's to stop them from your "implicit" endorsements of products/services you use from location data or with machine vision (something Google can already do with many logos in Street View imagery, I've discovered in my reporting)? Oh, that's right. Nothing. Which is why they don't want to have to ask for permission to do these things.
They actually can't. There's a world of difference between using a photo to depict an event, and using a photo to endorse.
"Domino's is featuring $5 large pizzas, here's your friend Bob at Domino's last week!" is legal.
"Look at Bob who loves our pizza, come try it out!" is not, unless Bob has signed off on it. You've crossed the line into commercial endorsement, which is a civil suit waiting to happen.
Now, there could potentially be an argument that depicting Bob at Domino's next to a paid message by Domino's is implied endorsement - that's something Instagram will have to figure out. IANAL, though I have studied commercial vs. editorial usage of photography reasonably deeply.
Using someone to endorse a product is a legally non-trivial proposition. It's not as simple as "we can use your photo here".
In both cases, Dominoes has paid Instagram to promote its product. In both cases, Instagram has taken a photo of Bob (taken by Bob? Taken by a friend of Bob's?) And attached it to a marketing effort on behalf of Dominoes. In neither case does the photo's subject (Bob) or its author (Bob?) have a say over the photo's use.
On the other hand, add the context of Facebook. What if Bob hit the like button in facebook? You could argue that hitting the button is an endorsement. Or perhaps if the ad is only displayed in a Facebook context where "like" is understood to mean pushing a button on a page, you could argue that the traditional meaning of "like" doesn't apply so it's not an endorsement.
It certainly goes into a gray area - but something as explicitly as "Bob likes Domino's! You should get Domino's too!" is a legal minefield I doubt anyone would willingly wade into.
They were granting themselves irrevokable rights to do things people didn't ever want them to be able to do.
[1] IANAL, but I think that's how it would work; for any licenceable aspect which you wish to grant exclusively, they can grant the same to one or more others, making it non-exclusive.
Eg. "it is not our intention to sell your photos"
But what if some kickass image analysis startup emerges that can mine valuable data from billions of pics. And then sell that data. So, just like Twitter with its firehose, Instagram licences its data to 3rd parties. They've just ruled that out (except they haven't, because licensing something is legally different to selling it, if not in substance).
It's a lawyer's job to leave terms as much in their client's favour as they can get away with. It would be foolish to close avenues for no reason. There's a balancing act with PR but overall I think Instagram were just unlucky here and handled it well.
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This whole time, I was thinking, "whatever they do, they won't back away from this language...why else would they drop a bombshell if they weren't willing to suffer the blowback"...And it turns out, it was just some optional path they were considering and thought, "what the hell, let's just put in there for now, no biggie"
???
Is that seriously the mindset of a billion dollar company? All I can imagine is:
1) They are lying
2) They really thought people wouldn't read the TOS (hasn't Facebook learned by now that someone will read it and make a big deal about troubling language?)
3) They are an incredibly careless company who will make other "mistakes" that could harm users.
I had been mostly ambivalent about this whole thing, as I don't maintain a very active Instagram account. But now I might just put in the energy to delete my account.
That is less clear than saying "We will not sell your photos." It's either a knowingly slippery statement, or they forgot how to not be slippery.
I see, they learned quite a bit from politicians. First push for the extremes, and if you get buried by bad press, produce a watered-down compromise.
Still, it is a surprisingly fair statement from a Facebook owned company.
Interesting use of the present tense in the second sentence, in an "I am not having an affair with that woman" sort of way.
Dr. Breen: "Let me read a letter I recently received. 'Dear Dr. Breen. Why has the Combine seen fit to suppress our reproductive cycle? Sincerely, A Concerned Citizen.' Thank you for writing, Concerned. Of course your question touches on one of the basic biological impulses, with all its associated hopes and fears for the future of the species. I also detect some unspoken questions. Do our benefactors really know what's best for us? What gives them the right to make this kind of decision for mankind? Will they ever deactivate the suppression field and let us breed again? Allow me to address the anxieties underlying your concerns, rather than try to answer every possible question you might have left unvoiced."
Instagram's terms of service stated that was their intentions:
To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.
The problem was how they communicated the change and they've admitted that too[2] although they've started to fix this with this blogpost and will continue to communicate this.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4939650
A few weeks later, we;re all given copies of the handbook and ordered to sign it. People read the handbook and it was very clear that the new rules were not in line with company culture at all. No drinking in the office when we had multiple beer fridges, stuff about how you can be fired with less notice, etc. Of course, no one in their right mind would agree to an amended rulebook while at a company, especially when they could freely move to another startup.
The thing that amazed me most though, was in our next company meeting, people kept asking the Director of Operations about the rulebook and he finally snapped to say "Look, I made some changes, if you dont like them, its just really not a big deal, I don't think the rulebook actually means anything anyway".
Okay so lets recap. Our director of operations spent months writing a "meaningless" document? Doubtful. If so, why WRITE the document at all? This is the parallel I see here. There was no reason whatsoever to change the terms, yet they had some presumably high priced lawyers rewrite them. Why would they do this? Do we really believe they spent time an effort updating these terms for no reason? To me, this reads as some SERIOUS backpedaling and I would be shocked if they actually didn't intend to use data in the exact way people were upset they would.
If you don't like the new ToS, when they switch to them and an accept/decline option comes up in the app you can feel free to decline and delete the app.
Now obviously network effects help something like this grow, but don't kid yourself. They aren't running a charity. They are running a business. At some point you have to start making money or the service just goes away. Then all that those amazing users "built" will be gone in a second when they flick the power switch.
If I as a customer pay any amount (including $0.00) and agree to the terms of service, the company should honor those terms, or, at the very least, be forthcoming with how they will handle my data.
The reason people are angry is because:
a) They didn't have any inclination of how Instagram will try to monetize. I think you are giving users way too much credit in how these startups work (ask your non-tech-savvy friends how Facebook or Google make money; I guarantee you will get blank stares). The customers who joined before Facebook took over signed a completely different set of ToS. Again, there is nothing obliging them legally to grandfather these customers, but it's not a nice thing to do "Thanks for the ToS. Btw, Facebook took over, so good luck!"
b) They tried to sneak in the changes and got caught. Nobody likes to have stuff done behind their back, so a big announcement with enough lead time to switch services would be nice. I don't use Instagram anyway, but I think this applies in general in how to treat your customers.
Everyone bitched when Facebook added ads, but guess what, they keep growing and people keep using it. Shocking.
The other thing is that a lot of people use Instagram to share photos they only want their close friends seeing, so people are more sensitive about privacy changes.
For example, I use Flickr as a free service, and I don't think they owe me anything. They could add advertising if they want, they could remove the free tier and shut down my account if I don't pay, they could shut down the service entirely, etc. That's all well within their rights, since they run the service. But imo it's a qualitative difference from those kinds of changes if they were to add new ToS terms claiming ownership or ownership-like rights over my photographs. That's very different because it can actually damage my career outside their service if I fail to notice the relevant ToS change and they grab some rights I didn't intend to license to them.
My account is now gone, same with atleast a dozen people I've talked to in the last day or so. I'd hazard a guess the quick response has been in response to sudden surge in accounts deleted.
Won't someone please think of the feelings of the millionaires!
I'm pretty sure they can wipe away their tears with $100 bills and their feelings won't suffer permanent damage. Since their feelings are so much more important than all of the people they are trying to fuck over.
Come on, the engineers made the product, the lawyers and the board made the company's legal arrangements. And they are utter bullshit.
Instagram is a company. The leaders are responsible for that unethical behavior and I'm not going to excuse them out of some bullshit appeal to programmer loyalty.
The fact that these are peers is MORE reason for us to be calling them out. Do you really want your profession to be associated with this sleazy behavior? They are poisoning the well for all of us.
Tech people today have the power and money to reshape the entire world. Yet so many of them are focused on extracting a few dollars through grossly unethical behavior. This is not praiseworthy behavior in any sense and you should be ashamed of yourself for defending it.
If my peers are going to be as sleazy and ethically bankrupt as, say, politicians or wall street bankers then I don't want them as peers. I would gladly throw them under the bus to protect the reputation of all tech people.
It is not complicated legalese; on the contrary it is admirably terse and lucid English. The reason that "it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation" is because that is EXACTLY what it says they will do.
Unambiguous. Not confusing. What's confusing is that Kevin Systrom now claims it does not say what it very clearly and unambiguously says.
When you sign up for a free service, you have to know that you are the product. PERIOD. Don't sign up for free services if you don't want to be the product. Go pay flickr. They will take your money. Stop bitching about free services adding ads so that they can keep the lights on and keep offering your free service. </rant>
It's a shame this is the case. Isn't it part of the point of legal documents to be hard to misinterpret? Isn't that supposed to be why they use such stiff language?
Also, lets not forget that this is not a startup talking to us anymore--this is a Facebook-owned company. I would expect Facebook to take full advantage of their intentionally vague legal wording.
Although with that said, they don't need to stop the bleeding as much as shut up the major negative press about it, and this statement will probably do that.
Actually the reason legal documents are written in a quirky funny dialect is to make them less ambiguous, not more so. If they are, whoever's written them is doing it wrong.
In today's social environment, the way people are made to feel like customers/users, only to later be sold as product, with little regard to privacy and/or control over their data and profile, isn't it funny how people are starting to assume the worst?
In all fairness, except for that bad start, later on you write the confusing language was your mistake, so you probably meant to say "Legal documents are hard to write, especially when people actually read them".
> Ownership Rights Instagram users own their content and Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos.
Um, yeah. What's "Ownership Rights"? It's not a legal term. Yet you capitalized and bolded the term. I'm sure you didn't mean to say "Copyrights" because you know what those are very well and take great care to not mention them. Also you can't have meant "Personality Rights" because they're generally non-transferable.
On the other hand, at least you acknowledged the public's reaction. And rather quickly, at that. That's good.
You also say you're listening and will improve the wording of the TOS. How that will turn out remains to be seen, when it happens. If so, I hope you'll excuse my skepticism.
To restate this another way: Instead of trying to imagine everything Instagram might be permitted to do under the TOS, imagine what you as a user do not want them to do, and then ask for explicit restrictions on those uses.
The FUD that CNet was able to perpetrate far outweighs any reasonable outcome that I can foresee. For this reason, I take Kevin at his word: both that they aren't going to do stupidly publish user pics on the side of buses, and that they will learn from this blunder.
Care to spellcheck and elaborate?
Isn't this just exactly how facebook fooled the world? You pay x to gain y followers and when they have bleed that river dry, they roll out another update that requires you to pay z if you want your posts to show up in their feed?
I'm looking forward to seeing how companies handle ToS changes moving forward. Is there a way to avoid the backlash altogether?
Err, write TOSes that are not a land grab of other people's intellectual private property and/or private data? You make it sound like it is unreasonable to care about that.
The predominant backlash to Google's recent ToS changes come to mind as an example of selective content being reported out of context.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/18/3780158/instagrams-new-te...
This story is giving me a headache.
Maybe sites will think about this next time they quietly changed their ToS.
It's little comfort for a company to say "oh the contract says X, but don't worry it's not true".
The take-away here is to actually properly review the ToS in light of "how might a user interpret this" not in "how can we make sure we have the absolute most coverage on our side".
Considering the photo quality of Instagram photos is extremely questionable, are people really upset that a photo of the nicoise salad they had could be used in an ad for for promotional purposes? Please. 99.9% of the photos on Instagram wouldn't be fit for advertising considering they're most shots of insecure teenagers taking photos in the mirror and the rest pictures of food.
Calm down.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/disruptions-instagr...
Is it because instagram is more disposable/replaceable to people?
Well, not everybody thinks about worst case scenarios.
What it really gets to is that there really aren't very good/affordable resources for artists and venues to reach a large audience.
Hiring a local "designer" is often really expensive and you end up with a crappy website that is hard to maintain.
Even using something as "simple" as WordPress can be way too technical for a lot of people.
FB has the benefit of giving them a platform that enables them to quickly connect with their audience.
I see it as a failure of the rest of the internet ecosystem.
So the upside is VERY VERY big. Well worth the risk.