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: 2) by fishybell on Monday June 08 2020, @04:28AM (3 children)
It's not like Instagram or Facebook owns the copyright to the image either. They don't have the power to give what they don't themselves have.
They have an explicit license from the copyright owner to use the image on their page (to use in a whole variety of ways) via the EULA the user clicked through. Transfering their own license to any number of unknown 3rd parties would likely run afoul of their EULA. Of course, it is their EULA, and they can change it if they want.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday June 08 2020, @04:56AM
For them to explicitly state they won't do so would appear to be a deliberate shot across the bow to... I have no idea who. People who embed IG.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @05:04AM
Except they do, they always give themselves the power to sub-license in the license terms. You have to, otherwise you literally cannot show it to anyone else or operate your website. And that is the real problem. By not extending their copyright license to embedders, they could easily find themselves on the hook for contributory and (arguably) vicarious infringement under the server test, which is the most commonly used theory of liability used in cases like this.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheRaven on Monday June 08 2020, @08:59AM
Spot the person who hasn't read the Facebook T&Cs. By agreeing to them, you agree to grant Facebook a non-revokable, non-exclusive, commercial, sublicensable, to any material you upload. You also agree to indemnify Facebook in cases where you do not own the rights, so if someone sues Facebook because of a copyright image that you upload, you are liable for their legal fees.
Apparently, some people are willing to agree to that.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @04:50AM (1 child)
Doesn't embedding just mean that there is code that tells the user's browser to fetch the image from Instagram's servers? At no time is it on anyone's machine except instagram and the surfer, hence no license necessary for anyone else.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @05:26AM
That is the essence of the "server test." The entity liable for infringing content is the entity serving the content. There is some flexibility if you "hotlink" without attribution, because it then appears that you are the entity serving the content, but Instagram embeds literally put a big fancy attribution box around the embedded content. I understand that Instagram doesn't want to turn into the copyright police to figure out whether a usage is allowed or not, but then the simple thing to do is block the embeds unless the accounts holder specifically allows it.
It is worth noting that there are theories that would make the embedders liable as well for embedding without permission, but none of that would seem to clear Instagram of their direct liability cause by their lack of desire to sublicense.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @05:23AM (3 children)
Following in a long line of failed failures, Intagram disappeared up its own anysss and nothing of value was lost. Nobody even noticed.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @06:30AM (1 child)
With Zuck sucking Trump's cock this week, good riddance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @01:31PM
Cock? That douche is totally the type to be munching ass. Especially after spicy tacos.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday June 08 2020, @02:25PM
At least they won't create a Photobucket bomb when they finally fall out of favor.
(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.