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