According to a court ruling, once you post an image on Instagram, you no longer control the rights to the image. In a lawsuit against Mashable (who won) by a photographer, Judge Wood put it in her ruling: “The user who initially uploaded the content has already granted Instagram the authority to sublicense the use of ‘public’ content to users who share it.”
As a result, many pro photographers are making their IG feeds private, according to an article at BuzzFeed.
I hate Instagram because photos should not be viewed on a phone. I have seen countless images there that I wished I could see on my computer screen and take in all the detail. I also hate the censorship, i.e., against nudity. I also cannot stand the torrent of images. A great photo should be savored. It should be easy to find again. Both the artist and the image should be honored. It is a myth that Instagram is about the photograph. It is a marketing and advertising platform.
With more than a billion active users, Instagram is the world’s largest visual platform, and it is vitally important to professional photographers. Photo editors and creatives use Instagram to find new photographers to assign work to, influencers and ad agencies use it to market products, and photographers use it to showcase their work. The new ruling presents photographers on Instagram with a stark choice: popularity or copyright.
The dispute started with this 2016 Mashable post on women photographers. Mashable reached out to photographer Stephanie Sinclair, who declined to license one of her images to the publication for their offered rate of $50. Sinclair’s work, which often documents human rights issues, has frequently appeared in the New York Times and National Geographic and is highly regarded by her peers. After she declined to license the image, Mashable embedded it in the story anyway. So, she sued them.
That is why Pixels will always be the anti-Instagram.
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