If you missed it the first
time around you can find the Washington Post story about it here. What I think
is the really outrageous part of the whole story isn’t so much the theoretical copyright
violations – although the author tells us that previous attempts to stop
similar projects through the courts have failed – as it is the fact that people
are apparently buying enlarged photos of Instagram pictures harvested on line.
And even that pales compared to the fact that somebody is apparently willing to
pay $90,000 USD apiece for photographs of images available online with just
enough alteration to be considered “transformative” rather than stolen…
The legal defense in this
case is apparently that if you take a picture and alter it in some way
(presumably in some way that makes it artistic, if it wasn’t already) that is
constitutes a new work and is therefore not a copyright violation of the
original. That might be difficult to argue in this case, since the only changes
the “artist” has made is to remove the original captions and then add some
apparently random comments of his own. But if the people whose pictures he’s
using want him to desist they will need to take legal action of their own, and
that’s not going to be easy considering that the artist has just made $90,000 a
pop selling large photographic prints of other people’s photos (you could hire
a lot of legal talent with only a few of those sales), and also considering
that Instagram itself will not help them…
When asked about this
project, and its legality, Instagram basically announced that they will help
you if someone is displaying pictures stolen from your account on the Instagram
site itself, but other than that you’re on your own. It’s difficult to blame
the company for that, either, since they are neither a law-enforcement agency
nor a court; short of creating a large legal department of their own and then
providing legal services to their users there isn’t much the company could do
about events that happen outside of its domain, even if it wanted to. But it
does mean that anyone whose pictures were stolen who decides to take action is
going to have to go it alone against a guy who routinely makes millions of
dollars selling “transformed” images for which he does not pay…
Now, I don’t need really to
tell you that anything you let loose on the Internet is probably going to be
stolen, or at least used without permission, at some point in the future – or that
there is no outer limit to how long things might remain kicking around
somewhere in cyberspace. For years it has been a truism that you shouldn’t post
anything online that you wouldn’t want printed on the front page of every
newspaper in the world that is still printing, and I’ve brought you any number
of stories about people who suffered various misfortunes because they forgot
that. There was even a new case this week, when a Spirit Airlines flight attendant posted a picture of herself standing inside the engine pod of an
airplane, resulting in yet another career-threating online incident. But this
time none of the people being used did anything wrong beyond not having a very esoteric
understanding of how copyright laws work…
I’m not sure where all of
this is going to end, either. But as someone who creates content and offers to
share it with anyone who comes by to take a look, without even monetizing the
site with display ads, I’ll admit that I don’t like where this trend is going –
or what it could potentially do to the online community…
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