Your post title is excellent Jane.

As for the power grab here, it’s sickening. I do not use Instagram. Never have. Now I’m thinking I might want to delete my facebook as well.

I knew being able to see a picture of what my cousin made for dinner anytime I wanted was too good to last; oh well back to the stone ages of e-mail and attaching.

Ditto.

I have not used Instagram or Flickr, but I do have a Facebook account not under Starbuck. Very little is on Facebook, but I may also delete that one anyway.

I haven’t looked at their terms closely and is a similar caveat on Facebook as well?

Pfft. Picture messaging on smart phones is sooo NOW.

If you are offered something for free, you are not the customer, you are the product.

I think facebook will be smart enough not to use under-18 photos. There’s a raft of ugly laws they could run afoul of.

The rest of us might not be so lucky.

Me, I’d copyright my image and my family, send a registered you-do-not-have-permission letter to facebook, and wait to see if they make me rich.

Boxturtle (copyrighting or incorporating ourselves may be our last line of defense)

My understanding is that facebook is allowed to use your uploaded personal photos in advertising, but only in targeted ads to people on your friends list. So the folks who see your photos in ads can already see your photos anyway.

Me, I’d copyright my image and my family, send a registered you-do-not-have-permission letter to facebook, and wait to see if they make me rich.

This doesn’t work. To sign up for facebook you accept a ‘terms and conditions’ agreement that states facebook can use your photos in the manner I described at 6. This acts as a caveat to any copyright protections you might have outside of facebook.

I wonder why agencies like ASMP or stock photo agencies are not raising holy hell. Any photographer who is represented by an agency also can use their own images as they see fit, usually in advertizing their business and such. So it is possible that an image on FB or Instagram (or???) that would ordinarily be available commercially through the agency might well be used commercially, neatly sidestepping the agency as well as the photographer.

You can’t delete it. If you follow their delete process, after two weeks it will supposedly be gone perm. But they’ll keep what’s there.

If I was on facebook, I’d update all my photo’s with something black, change all my text to garbage, wait a year for the backups to roll, then demand they delete the account.

Boxturtle (Trust Facebook? I’d sooner pet a shark)

However, if you put a copyrighted image on Instagram with the conditions stated and you continue with that photo in your account, you have given up that copyright.

Nowhere does it say copyright material excepted.

Also, you own copyright by law the instant you press the shutter. No filing is necessary, but certainly advisable. Publishing without copyright notice loses it as well, so for the majority of images uploaded on Instagram etc, the owner has given it up as it would be considered published.

Every image I put on any site gets the notice, and exceptional ones get collected as a suite and registered with the copyright office. That allows for triple damages if it comes down to suing.

Is it any wonder why Facebook is the world’s most hated company? I’m proud to say that I don’t have a FB account because of the abusive nature of that company.

I’d love for a lawyer with a rich client to take a shot at that. There’s quite a bit of stuff in disclaimers that wouldn’t hold up in court if challenged. But they put it there in hopes that folks won’t take it to court.

Facebook has some really sharp copyright lawyers on their staff. It would be an uphill fight against them.

Boxturtle (Privacy laws need major improvement)

If so, then the copyright notice has to be transmitted as well. If they don’t, you can sue.

ASMP has been very successful in backing a photographer who is challenging a copyright infringement that, if the defendant is successful, would amount to a watering down of copyright protections.

And people wonder why I almost never mess with Facebook any more…

… this would seem to be in violation of the FTC’s privacy guidelines which states “companies should give consumers the option to decide what information is shared about them, and with whom.”

There’s not even an apparent violation since the language is conditional and allows for discretion.

Yeah, I know: the US Constitution employs the unambiguous shall and shall not, which is more or less discretionary nowadays.

For a little background….this isnt necessarily audacious.

Without going into great detail, part of my career was dealing with talent. Talent often tried to make a buck under the table. Or people without representation didnt have a clue about contracts.

So Stage Mom sees and ad from a reputable local photographer wanting models for his portfolio. Stage Mom drooled at the thought of making another couple hundred bucks off her kids. And did all this own her own and thought she could avoid our nasty commission. She signed a STANDARD release. I stress standard because most contracts said more or less the same thing. This is why you should use professionals to deal with clients.

Fast forward maybe 6 months. Stage Mom is getting her meal tickets – err kids – Happy Meals. She was shocked discover that her child was on the box!!! Enraged she called us and wanted us to get her all the money she was owed. Of course I questionedI reviewed her release and it was pretty boiler plate. And I wonder why you would be shocked that a successful stock photographer would sell some stock photography. Legally she had nothing.

Anyway… my point is that while I find Facebooks latest string of actions deplorable, they arent really outlandish in respect to the way stuff already works.

This seems similar to small print many blogs have, you might post a brilliant article on Daily Kos but you dont really have any rights to it. I bet they could sell it to the New Yorker and you couldnt get a dime out of it.

I think the real issue her is that sooooooooo many people invested so much of their time to FB. I know people who essentially live on it. Live contact and actual phones are rare. I think they are just shocked to find out that oddly enought its actually a money making venture.

I cant go into detail about something because of an NDA but I recently particpated in something related to FB that I found especially pernicous. If I had to extrapulate I would say that within a year or two people will be dropping friends because their posts arent just boring comments about their cats bowel movements but outright spam. You’ll long for the days people just “Liked” everything they looked at

I could write an entire thesis on insta gram. Its purpose is for the under 40 set who never really dealt with analog photgraphy and want bland camera pics to have some character.

A couple of years back I scanned all my mom’s photos and spent a good amount of time fixing color and texture. Remember how you could tell the camara used just by the photo. So I have pics from 70 years ago that now look like they were just taken. I laughed when the insta gram craze hit because people were doing to there pix what I spent a couple of weeks undoing to mine

So Willard was right.

“Corporations are people my friends” or s.t. like that

An electrical telegraph was independently developed and patented in the United States in 1837 by Samuel Morse. His assistant, Alfred Vail, developed the Morse code signalling alphabet with Morse. The first telegram in the United States was sent by Morse on 11 January 1838, across two miles (3 km) of wire at Speedwell Ironworks near Morristown, New Jersey. On 24 May 1844, he sent the message “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT” from the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol in Washington to the old Mt. Clare Depot in Baltimore. This message (quoting Numbers 23:23) was chosen by Annie Ellsworth of Lafayette, Indiana,[14] the daughter of Patent Commissioner Henry Leavitt Ellsworth. The message was all capital letters because the original Morse code alphabet had no question mark or lower case.

Guess what? The Toobz are no different than the conveyance device of the telegraph except that it’s reaaaly fast and the density of information conveyed is much higher.

The first commercially successful transatlantic telegraph cable was successfully completed on 18 July 1866. The lasting connections were achieved by the ship SS Great Eastern, captained by Sir James Anderson.[15] Earlier transatlantic submarine cables installations were attempted in 1857, 1858 and 1865. The 1857 cable only operated intermittently for a few days or weeks before it failed. The study of underwater telegraph cables accelerated interest in mathematical analysis of very long transmission lines. The telegraph lines from Britain to India were connected in 1870 (those several companies combined to form the Eastern Telegraph Company in 1872).

Notice the tax dollars at work? Yes, The People via their governmental structures footed the bill for the research, development, testing and deployment of electronic communications in the 1800s and it’s been no different since then. Fauxbook, their lawyers and the birds with which they flock would lay claim to the information content of smoke signals if they thought they could get away with it.

All of which raises the question of why the hell FDL ever installed the Facebook links and thereby helped Facebook grow. Last time I checked, progressives were supposed to care deeply about privacy. Facebook clearly never has. Why did FDL jump on the Facebook bandwagon Jane?

Thank you, Jane. Thank you very much!
I was about to download the Instagram app and dive in.
But not a chance.
And speaking of Facebook, it has a game entitled “Sniper Headshot” featuring a photo of an assault rifle similar to the one used in Connecticut, which is called a “Bush Buster”. Hmm.

The People via their governmental structures have bank rolled every phase of electronic communications since its discovery all the way to the first “commercial” production systems in the 1800s. Please review the history of who associated with the governmental systems were involved and what was done for which the tax dollars were paid. Some key excerpts are “Morse telegraph,” “Oceanic telegraph cables,” “Western Union,” and “Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company.” Notice the theme of public systems made into private toll booth operations. So, the telegraph like the Internet is a conveyance device. Now since the concept of money is also actualized via digital conveyance devices since bank wire transfers came into being, this is part of a very systematic “asset stripping” attempt that IS a big deal. Facebook, its lawyers and the birds of a feather with which they flock are the kind of vertebrates that ARE actually saying “All Your 0s and 1s Are Belong To Us.”

Wonder what happens when someone pulls one of my pictures off my website because they like it, and then post it to Instagram.

Neither Instagram nor Facebook would have any rights to that image since the original copyright holder (me) had not given permission to the other person to post it there. Since *I* haven’t given up my copyright, nor assigned the rights to anyone else, seems like FB or IG would be liable for damages should they use such a photo?

Seems to be opening a pretty big can of lawsuits.

Kinda off topic but not really.
I went on a gun nut neighbor’s Facebook timeline the other day. I was looking for the entry wherein he bragged about owning a French military boozoka. I had defriended him the day of the Tuscon shooting because I thought an assault on two Federal officers was beyond the pale. Little did I know there is a whiter shade of pale.
Any how, you can still see a person’s timeline even if they are not a friend. He had deleted most of his damaging stuff, but I noticed that he had what purported to be a privacy notice to all, to the effect that if you did not have his permission to see his timeline you were violating his privacy . I just had to laugh at the gun nut logic that you belong to a social media site but then expect privacy from not only the site but every one else.
BTW what’s Instagram or even Flickr. I can’t keep up with all the crazy social media stuff that is supposed to keep us “connected” in our isolation.

By BTW I never connect to anything through Facebook tho I have a Facebook account, sans my photo. With the NSA out there you can be too connected.

The first recourse would be a DMCA take-down & cease and desist demand. (Scroll to see especially “Title II: Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act”).

Note: IANAL.

“Publishing without copyright notice loses it as well,”

That is not true, but the gist of your thought is on track. You are probably thinking of Trademarks, where you as the holder have to activiely protect the mark.

These may help you:

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html

You do not have to register your copyright to get protection as long as you have some proof you ‘created’ it, but if you need to pursue legal remedies it needs to be registered so the courts can determine appropriate responses (ie. no registration not much money, registered – some money). I suspect contract lawyers wil have something to chat with judges about on those click-through agreements.

my thought is that the agreement would just state that YOU affirm that the image/s are your property etc and if not then you are completely liable for any claims etc.

OK… this is just me extrapolating. I dont think they were going to sell the pictures as images but were going to sell them for datamining.

I can envision a scenerio where if you took pictures of your bachelorette party at Cafe Trendy that image gets “shared” without your express consent. And if it was just going from instagram to FB then that eases copyright in some ways plus you have the user agreement, plus the photos are already public in a sense. So it might look like an update from you. [My Name] and [all the people that got autotagged] at Cafe Trendy. Then it does the same thing for all the autotagged people. But its just paid advertising by Cafe Trendy.

National Geographic drops Instagram too

Slate is claiming in an update to their article about this issue that Instagram is backing away from this idea:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/12/18/instagram_privacy_uproar_why_it_s_absurd_in_three_nearly_identical_sentences.html