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Instagram just threw users of its embedding API under the bus:
Instagram does not provide users of its embedding API a copyright license to display embedded images on other websites, the company said in a Thursday email to Ars Technica. The announcement could come as an unwelcome surprise to users who believed that embedding images, rather than hosting them directly, provides insulation against copyright claims.
"While our terms allow us to grant a sub-license, we do not grant one for our embeds API," a Facebook company spokesperson told Ars in a Thursday email. "Our platform policies require third parties to have the necessary rights from applicable rights holders. This includes ensuring they have a license to share this content, if a license is required by law."
In plain English, before you embed someone's Instagram post on your website, you may need to ask the poster for a separate license to the images in the post. If you don't, you could be subject to a copyright lawsuit.
Professional photographers are likely to cheer the decision, since it will strengthen their hand in negotiations with publishers. But it could also significantly change the culture of the Web. Until now, people have generally felt free to embed Instagram posts on their own sites without worrying about copyright concerns. That might be about to change.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @09:30PM
I have a small website, and some of my photos are CC-BY-NC-SA. The idea is that is will be cited properly, if something in description is borked the responsibility is in my end, not someone else's, and will not be resold on some shady patron site like most of old Web 1.0's worthy content is currently sold.
Recently I found a few of my photos commercially exploited on a site which shows ads, tracks users and nags about registration. Well, to get to their support, I have to register. To view "Terms", I have to run their malicious tracking code. While a typical search engine stores and buffers thumbnails which seems reasonable for their operation, these folks go a full storage of half of the Internet showing domain instead of link as a source... rarely, as mostly the site is not even mentioned and source is not present!
While I disagree with "copying==theft" doctrine, I think citing sources is the most important part in publishing responsibility. Also, if someone thinks in this doctrine, I can adapt to this. So these, we can finally call them by their own definition: thieves, have all this "intellectual property" babble in their page, but... only about their code.
So I decided to look further. It came out that the problem is known and there is a solution which people blindly perform, giving a full control of their content to this company. The solution is to make a meta-tag in my page with the service's registered brand name and some attribute. It's not only an advertisement, but, knowing what recently happened with unofficial iPhones repair shops, they can sue me like Apple did for violating the trademark! Additionally, the hosting space and transfer limits do not grow on trees, and applying their spam in pages increases usage of both.
Let's screw this. I like helping other, so I decided that if I'll need some photos from them to illustrate my things, I would "borrow" them on the same conditions. But also, at 3 am, I finally invented them a copy-protection mechanism: I'll just put something like this as photo source:
"For thieves from Pi...: To avoid being robbed, you should add into builtin metadata of every file a numerical proof attempt of Riemann hypothesis. This must be done by attaching the series of function arguments (R+I pairs) for its zeros until the size of the compressed results exceeds 250TB, so that the single file size is 250TB+image data size."
As most of small hostings do not exceed a few GBs, I think I successfully solved their problem of copying these files too :-D.