New Insta­gram Terms of Ser­vice.

The Facebook-ification is starting:

Some or all of the Ser­vice may be sup­ported by adver­tis­ing
rev­enue. 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.

Where by “meta­data”, they’re not talk­ing about expo­sure and shut­ter speed. They’re talk­ing about loca­tion. Just awful.

[Dar­ing Fire­ball]

It’s actu­ally much worse than that. Accord­ing to the terms of ser­vice, not only Insta­gram may do basi­cally any­thing they want with your pho­tos, includ­ing license them out to oth­ers, they also say:

You rep­re­sent and war­rant that: (i) you own the Con­tent posted by you on or through the Ser­vice or oth­er­wise have the right to grant the rights and licenses set forth in these Terms of Use; (ii) the post­ing and use of your Con­tent on or through the Ser­vice does not vio­late, mis­ap­pro­pri­ate or infringe on the rights of any third party, includ­ing, with­out lim­i­ta­tion, pri­vacy rights, pub­lic­ity rights, copy­rights, trade­mark and/or other intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights; (iii) you agree to pay for all roy­al­ties, fees, and any other monies owed by rea­son of Con­tent you post on or through the Ser­vice; and (iv) you have the legal right and capac­ity to enter into these Terms of Use in your jurisdiction.

What that means you as the pho­tog­ra­pher could eas­ily wind up in very deep, very expen­sive legal trou­ble just because you used Insta­gram. Con­sider how this could play out: you take a photo of a ran­dom com­plete stranger on the street and dis­play it freely as an exam­ple of street pho­tog­ra­phy. So far, so good. How­ever, some­one in the PR depart­ment at a generic huge cor­po­ra­tion sees the photo and pays Insta­gram $100,000 to sub­li­cense your photo for a major adver­tis­ing cam­paign. You don’t get any say, or any of the money. Now it’s not look­ing so good. Now we’re get­ting into dan­ger­ous ter­ri­tory, because use of a person’s image for com­mer­cial pur­poses requires a signed model release–which doesn’t exist.

But it gets worse! The ran­dom per­son on the street sees the adver­tise­ments promi­nently fea­tur­ing their face and decides to sue. Because of the Insta­gram terms of ser­vice, you get hung out to dry by Insta­gram and the huge cor­po­ra­tion. Con­grat­u­la­tions, your lit­tle art photo taken with Insta­gram has cost you tens of thou­sands of dol­lars. Too bad your life is ruined because you didn’t read the terms of service.

This really is just like Face­book.