"Apparently losing rights to data and legal recourse is not enough of a reason to inspect online contracts. So how can websites get users to read the fine print?" asks The Guardian. Perhaps people will listen to them if only to lull themselves to sleep.
A cybersecurity software company claims that photo-sharing app BeReal owns the rights to users' photos for "30 years."
A couple of months ago, automotive photographer Jack Schroeder and model Britni Sumida filed a lawsuit against car maker Volvo, accusing them of "willful and wanton" copyright infringement. In a major update to the case, Volvo is trying to get the suit thrown out by claiming that all public Instagram photos are basically free to use and share.
The past few years have made it abundantly clear that platforms hold disproportionate power in the online sphere – from Uber to Grubhub to Amazon. Online success is predicated on building both utility as well as a critical mass of users, and for that, platforms should be congratulated.
If you're a 500px member who hasn't logged in to the photo sharing and selling service for a while, you may be asked to agree to an updated Terms of Service document upon logging in. The latest agreement is causing an uproar (and a new wave of account deletions) among many photographers, but it doesn't appear that anything has changed from a legal or rights standpoint.
Tim Gamble is a Manchester, UK-based photographer who uses light-painting techniques to create surreal and abstract artworks. His photos are almost entirely created in-camera, so imagine Gamble's surprise when 500px unexpectedly deleted his account for "posting non-photographic content."
Facebook has suspended 10 large groups on its service that were being used by hundreds of thousands of people to game Instagram in hopes of making their photos more popular.
If you have a free 500px photo sharing account or are considering joining the service, here's a change that happened earlier this year you may not be aware of: free accounts can now only upload 7 photos per week, down from 20.
Since 2003, the popular photo hosting service Photobucket has been letting users upload and host images for free on their servers. They have over 10 billion images stored by 100 million registered users. But now they're going to start charging, and that means billions of images around the Web are now broken.
In their recently released report titled "Growing Up Digital," the UK Children's Commissioner did something we wish tech companies would do more of: they had a lawyer "translate" Instagram's Terms of Use into language that children (and their parents) could actually understand.
Social media have so thoroughly infused our everyday lives that calling them “ubiquitous” seems inadequate. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and others take up an astonishing amount of our time, bandwidth, and attention, and have become indispensable business and marketing tools as well.
Instagram is the most common platform photographers, clients and models use to meet and follow each other. Recently though, accounts are getting shut down and mine, with a following of 135,000, was among them.
On Christmas Day of last year, we shared the news that Instagram was still dealing with fallout after their infamous Terms of Service mishap. Even after scaling back the Policy to pacify angry users, the company still faced with a class action lawsuit.
Well, fortunately for parent company Facebook, that chapter seems to finally be closing, and it's doing so without the social network having to write a many-zeroed check.
When it comes to Instagram, there's been some serious controversy over ownership rights and Terms of Service. You can take the photos with the app, edit them in the app, host them on the app's servers, and ultimately sign over certain rights to the app. Not everybody likes this arrangement.
Pressgram is creator John Saddington's solution to the problem. It's an Instagram alternative that allows you to host your images using WordPress (either .org or .com) and retain 100 percent ownership rights.
In December 2012, Instagram took steps toward profitability by adding some controversial monetization-related sections to its Terms of Service. The resulting outcry led to key sections being restored to original 2010 versions, but that didn't stop a certain user named Lucy Funes from launching a class action lawsuit against the photo sharing service.
The latest news in the saga is that Instagram is now asking that the lawsuit be thrown out.
If you’re the type of photographer who’s wary of the rights you sign away when using most photo-sharing services, …
A couple of days ago, there were murmurings on the web that Instagram experienced a sharp drop in usage numbers following its ill-handled Terms of Service change. The story was based on findings by analytics firm AppStats, which claimed that Instagram's Daily Active User count had fallen from over 15 million to around 5 million in the span of about one month.
Now Instagram (and its parent company Facebook) are speaking up and denying that it is seeing a max exodus of disgruntled users. The company has released usage figures for the first time in its young life.
Instagram's new terms of service -- the ones that caused all kinds of trouble for parent company Facebook before being re-modified -- finally go into effect this coming Saturday.
Given that it's been almost a month since those terms were suggested, Instagram and Facebook may have been hoping that the controversy would have blown over by this time. Unfortunately, the stats seem to show otherwise.
After the Instagram Terms of Service controversy erupted this past week, Randall Munroe of XKCD published …
Instagram has had its share of ups and downs during its 2 short years of life, but we think we can safely say that this past week has been the lowest of lows for the popular-but-beleaguered photo sharing service. After hastily pushing out major edits to its terms of service in preparation for money-making plans, users complained, the media pounced, and Instagram backtracked, saying it would revise the terms to appease its users.
Those revisions happened today. Instagram founder Kevin Systrom has announced that key sections of the service's terms have been rolled back to its original 2010 condition.
If you had any doubts regarding how much of a part of our culture Instagram has become, just take a peek at the public outcry that erupted after Instagram announced changes to its policies yesterday. The controversial edits were reported in media outlets around the world, and legions of die-hard Instagram fans took to social media channels to protest them.
People mainly focused on a section of the document that appears to give Instagram sweeping permissions to sell photos without consent or compensation to third-parties for advertising purposes.
Earlier this month, Facebook stated that it's working on strategies for monetizing Instagram. Now we're starting to see the gears in the money-making machine warming up.
Instagram announced an update to its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy documents today, with changes that will take effect on January 16, 2013. While it's understandable that any service's terms must change if rolls out a new business model, many users aren't pleased with what some of the updated sections say.
John Herrman over at BuzzFeed has written up an interesting piece on how and why "grabby" terms of service have become ubiquitous in the online world of social media:
There has been a lot of discussion regarding social media sites and their scary-sounding terms of services that always …
A little update to the recent brouhaha over Google+’s Terms of Service: …
Last year Scott Bourne caused some commotion among photo-enthusiasts by claiming that Twitter's ToS forced photographers to give up rights to photos shared through the service. After Google launched their new Google+ social network, Bourne again wrote a very similar post warning his readers about the ToS. We weren't planning on weighing in, but seeing that the FUD has spread to our comments and even The Washington Post, we'd like to clear some of it away for our readers.
Since launching in 2008, TwitPic has been at the center of quite a few copyright controversies and legal battles, especially when disasters strike and Twitter users are able to publish photos of things that are happening well before major news outlets. Back in early 2010 photographer Daniel Morel had an iconic photograph taken during the Haiti earthquake widely republished in newspapers across the world without his permission after he uploaded the photos to TwitPic, then later that year Twitter's decision to display TwitPic photos directly on their website caused a brouhaha. TwitPic has finally decided to update their Terms of Service to make it clear that users of the service retain the copyright of everything they upload.
Last week Scott Bourne published an article on Photofocus titled, "Photos On Twitter – What You Should Know". In it, he claimed that Twitter's terms of service (TOS) forced photographers to give Twitter a license to do whatever they wanted with photos shared through the service. The argument centered around a couple paragraphs found in the document:
By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).
This was used to argue that Twitter owns a license to photos shared through the service.
Earlier this month, the Daily Mail published some photos taken at a Dalston …
Kodak made the surprising announcement today that their Chief Marketing Officer Jeffrey Hayzlett is resigning on May 28th to …
Photojournalist Daniel Morel shot an iconic image of a shocked woman looking out from the rubble moments after last …