WHAT: Photography organisations in the US and Europe are uniting to campaign against Instagram’s Revised Terms of Use (January 19, 2013).
WHO: The American Society of Media Photographers, The National Press Photographers Association, The Digital Media Licensing Association, American Photographic Artists, This Week in Photography, Professional Photographers of America, Coordination of European Picture Agencies Stock, Press and Heritage, Graphic Artists Guild and American Society of Picture Professionals.
WHY: Few of the users who share images on Instagram understand the rights they are giving away whenever they upload a photo on Instagram.
Instagram Terms of Use are written in a way that creates a walled garden — a private collection of the world’s visual legacy that is privately owned and available for commercial exploitation with little regard to the wishes of the millions of people who created or appear in the photos. The TOU allows Instagram (also called the Service) to sell or license photos without providing any compensation to the photographer.
Most importantly, the Instagram Terms of Use creates a Hotel California for your images. You can check them in, but you can’t check out. Once uploaded, Instagram asserts the right to make your photos and your identity part of the Service forever. Users also agree to pay for the company’s lawyers if anyone in a photo ever sues the company or sues anyone to whom the company licenses the photos.
An additional concern is that these user-unfriendly Terms of Use may be adopted by other social media sites and eventually become industry standard.
Read The Instagram Papers on ASMP site [pdf]
via bjp