Instagram will be able to sell pictures without their authors’ consent

Home → Instagram News → Instagram will be able to sell pictures without their

authors’ consent

Instagram had made one of the most important changes in its marketing policy since this

social network was bought by Facebook and its financing by advertising was announced. As

the company itself has stated, from January 16th, 2014 onwards, Instagram will be able to sell

to a third party the pictures that the users had uploaded in this social network if they consider

this appropriate, without paying anything to the author and without giving any prior notice. This

news has raised a lot of alarms and the users of this social network have made their confusion

and displeasure well known all around the world.

From now on, any picture that appears on

Instagram can be bought by any other company to be used with any end (even with publicity

purposes). A third party can do all this through a direct negotiation with Instagram and not with

the picture’s author. The only way we can avoid that Instagram will be entitled to use our

picture in any way it wants is to delete our profile in this social network before January 16th.

This policy isn’t new on Internet and, in fact, it is beginning to be the general rule. This news

had been made public only days after Youtube modified its algorithms and after the claims of

copyright infringement against this page have multiplied. The main goal of this kind of policy

seems to be for the users to lose all the control they should have over their creations, being

these pictures or videos, and for the platforms to have the total control over the publication

and distribution of the works they host.

For example, it’s like one painter exhibits one of his/her paintings in a museum and the

individuals responsible for that museum decide unilaterally that they can sell that painting to

whoever they want. The only difference is that Instagram has an enormous potential, not only

artistic, but social as well.

Ultimately, one of the main goals that Instagram (and, by extension, of Facebook) wants to

achieve adopting this measure is to commercialize our personal information. From our

pictures and from the circle of friends we have in the social networks, experts can obtain a lot

of information about us and there are a lot of companies that are willing to pay a lot of money

for this information (don’t forget that information is power). To sell this pictures or information

to a third party can have a lot of unpleasant consequences: on the one hand, they are selling

without our consent something we have created on our own; on the other hand, we will never

know in which hands this information is going to end or the use the people who had bought it

is going to make of it.

If, until now, the only worries of Instagram’s users were related to the wish to obtain more

followers or to buy likes on Instagram, from now on they are going to have a very serious

problem: to know that their pictures are susceptible to become a merchandise, whatever they

want them to be or not.

This post is also available in: Spanish