Category: Copyright

If all of this seems vaguely familiar, it’s because it’s basically what Facebook has been doing with Sponsored Posts for months now — advertisers can pay to “sponsor” your posts in various categories to make sure they prominently appear in your friends’ News Feeds. So if you “like” The Hobbit, the filmmakers can pay Facebook to promote that post across Facebook

Why did I quit Instagram? It’s the thoughtlessness, stupid.

Instagram is blowing it hard on both the WHAT (selling your images with no profit to you) and the HOW…by changing the ToC to gobble up your imagery bound to by using the service after allowing users to build up huge followings and large libraries of imagery. Lame sauce and an assault on your work

Earlier this year, I wrote an article entitled “Why Instagram is Terrible for Photographers, and You Should Use It.”

Today, I’d like to fully retract that statement because, screw those guys for ruining something fun

What they have done is signal the end and failure of what could have been a revolutionary social media platform for visual communication. Now, I must take a step back and reassess my place on Instagram.
—Benjamin Lowy

Today Instagram unleashed brand-new terms of service that has rubbed many of its loyal users the wrong way. Instagram can sell your photos to third parties for ads without telling you.

First, no declaration by you, in a Facebook posting, would make any difference to the legal status of your posts. You’re already protected by copyright law.

The problem lies in the fact that there is currently no clear process for owners to retrieve property that federal prosecutors effectively seized when they shuttered the file-sharing and cyberlocker service last January over issues of alleged copyright infringement.

Buzzfeed, he said, has image deals with several agencies, including The Associated Press, Reuters, Getty Images and celebrity shops. Sometimes, he said, the site has the rights to photos, but its staff lift them from blogs on the internet, where the picture was already pilfered, he said.

He equated it to a “training” problem.

At only 22 years old, LA resident Megan McIsaac has a truly impressive body of work under her belt. She has a way of capturing the world around her with pure honesty; of illicting incredibly intimate reactions from her subject matter

A landmark fair use ruling

The deal is a huge concession by Google, which up until now had maintained it had a fair-use right under copyright law and did not need permission from rights holders to scan the digital library of the future.