The Instagram rights grab – poor drafting or a U-turn?
Online photo-sharing service Instagram have now been forced to issue a denial that the recent change in their terms of service was intended to give them the rights to sell on their users’ photos to advertisers, without paying or indeed even asking the users concerned.
The new terms of service required users to grant Instagram a “non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide licen[c]e to use the content that you post on or through the service” and also allowed “a business or other entity [to] pay [Instagram] to display your username, likeness, photos and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.”
Instagram now say that the change was intended “to communicate that we’d like to experiment with innovative advertising that feels appropriate on Instagram” and blamed confusing language for the misunderstanding.
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