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Instagram Might Not Care About Copyright Law and It Could Land Them in Trouble

9 points by FireBeyond 5y ago

Scaevolus 5y ago
The DMCA doesn't grant copyright protection. It's simply a streamlined mechanism for informing a host that they're infringing. Anyone quoting the RIAA and agreeing with them is probably more concerned with rent-seeking than considering why copyrights exist in the first place and the public interest.
- FireBeyond 5y ago
  I'm not sure what public interest is served by allowing people to post your work verbatim on a monetized account with no attribution.
  - whythre 5y ago
    Because right now the system is skewed too far the other direction. Fair use is ignored and corporate interests are allowed to step on small innocent creators like cockroaches.
    - DisjointedHunt 5y ago
      Instagram is hardly a “small innocent creator”, they are a platform and if they are able to provide a scaled process to blast copyrighted content to hundreds of millions of people with no consequence, that is just not fair. The issue here is they deliberately curtail the ability of these very small innocent creators you speak of (read the article) by burying them in paperwork and forcing them to adopt a 1:1 reporting approach for each and every single piece of content and continue to blast them with follow up emails for each of those before they do anything about the content that has by then, accumulated the bulk of its impressions and views. It is in their financial interests to adopt this stance as they provide a “free” service that relies on the work on content creators(legal or not) to generate interest within their audiences. If those content creators have a recourse that’s so pathetic as to be called a joke, then I’d say they’re liable to these guys.
  - hamburgerwah 5y ago
    What exactly makes it your work? You were almost certainly educated in public schools and got there via public roads, you food and water heavily subsidized by the public. Your work probably uses a language and letters and tools you did not invent. All works have always belonged to the public. Only in the past century or two were we dumb enough to be bamboozled into granting people what was supposed to be a brief monopoly on a work before it rightfully finds it's place in the public domain.
DisjointedHunt 5y ago
What’s scary is the immense gap in capabilities permitted to copyright holders in identifying violations because of the closed nature of the platform. Instagram, like Facebook, Apple , Google or any other tech company has the capability to detect “similar” images. Indeed, they use this information in addition to information about inferred concepts of the image to rank and suggest similar images to users when they scroll through the search page or discover. This act of “suggesting” content that has been known to have had copyright flags against it makes them complicit in my opinion. That they have only one, highly guarded way to search for related content is an insult (try finding this method I’m speaking about without me providing any other keywords other than to say it’s a partner only integration where signatures of content can be uploaded for protection)

9 points by FireBeyond 5y ago

The DMCA doesn't grant copyright protection. It's simply a streamlined mechanism for informing a host that they're infringing. Anyone quoting the RIAA and agreeing with them is probably more concerned with rent-seeking than considering why copyrights exist in the first place and the public interest.

FireBeyond 5y ago
I'm not sure what public interest is served by allowing people to post your work verbatim on a monetized account with no attribution.
- whythre 5y ago
  Because right now the system is skewed too far the other direction. Fair use is ignored and corporate interests are allowed to step on small innocent creators like cockroaches.
  - DisjointedHunt 5y ago
    Instagram is hardly a “small innocent creator”, they are a platform and if they are able to provide a scaled process to blast copyrighted content to hundreds of millions of people with no consequence, that is just not fair. The issue here is they deliberately curtail the ability of these very small innocent creators you speak of (read the article) by burying them in paperwork and forcing them to adopt a 1:1 reporting approach for each and every single piece of content and continue to blast them with follow up emails for each of those before they do anything about the content that has by then, accumulated the bulk of its impressions and views. It is in their financial interests to adopt this stance as they provide a “free” service that relies on the work on content creators(legal or not) to generate interest within their audiences. If those content creators have a recourse that’s so pathetic as to be called a joke, then I’d say they’re liable to these guys.
- hamburgerwah 5y ago
  What exactly makes it your work? You were almost certainly educated in public schools and got there via public roads, you food and water heavily subsidized by the public. Your work probably uses a language and letters and tools you did not invent. All works have always belonged to the public. Only in the past century or two were we dumb enough to be bamboozled into granting people what was supposed to be a brief monopoly on a work before it rightfully finds it's place in the public domain.

DisjointedHunt 5y ago

What’s scary is the immense gap in capabilities permitted to copyright holders in identifying violations because of the closed nature of the platform. Instagram, like Facebook, Apple , Google or any other tech company has the capability to detect “similar” images. Indeed, they use this information in addition to information about inferred concepts of the image to rank and suggest similar images to users when they scroll through the search page or discover. This act of “suggesting” content that has been known to have had copyright flags against it makes them complicit in my opinion. That they have only one, highly guarded way to search for related content is an insult (try finding this method I’m speaking about without me providing any other keywords other than to say it’s a partner only integration where signatures of content can be uploaded for protection)