I find this thread really fascinating. I have a hard time imagining a more better apology from Instagram. They accept responsibility, there isn't a trace of hostility towards any of the people who 'misinterpreted' their terms, they are upfront about needing to make money, and they communicate (or attempt to) that they were never in favor of any of those kind of downright villainous things it seemed like they were in favor of. If anyone in the masses of angry Instagram users could be appeased by words, this is probably about as good as you could do at appeasing them.
However, judging from the responses here, a lot of Instagram users are unappeasable, and I don't think unreasonably. Their motives are basically unknowable by anyone not in their inner circle, so all we have to go on is their actions and their words. If your internal heuristics say that when it looks like a social media company is trying to steal your personal data/intellectual property, they probably are and will then lie about it after the fact... well, that seems like a reasonable heuristic to have this day and age. I'm not sure I buy into it unreservedly, but I wouldn't try to convince anyone they're wrong about it, either.
This whole event shows me (or at least, reminds me) that there are limits to what words can fix.
It's not a great apology because it implies things were just unclear, and need to be clarified. And we were silly for being confusing by the tricky legal stuff.
For instance, they say "The language we proposed also raised question about whether your photos can be part of an advertisement." No, the language they proposed clearly said that was something they could do: "you agree that a business may pay us to display your photos in connection with paid content." (paraphrased) Or the bit about "you own your photos and that hasn't changed". True, but that's not what people were complaining about. They were complaining about how it says "you own your photos but you grant us the rights to do anything with them up to selling them." Instagram just saying "you own your photos" back is meaningless as a response and sounds like they think we are just stupid.
>I have a hard time imagining a more better apology from Instagram.
I don't. This message from on high wasn't particularly bad for a startup, but there are plenty of internet "lifestyle businesses" that can communicate with their user base much much better. The guys who accidentally turn their hobby projects into a small, sustainable business for themselves talk to their userbase with a level of candidness that you'll never see from startup guys, so don't piss on my leg and tell me its raining.
I can imagine a better explanation from instagam easily. It wouldn't start with "Legal documents are easy to misinterpret", it would start with "It's no secret that lawyers will write contract terms as strongly in our favor as possible in a general cover-your-ass measure. Even though we don't plan to do the thing you're all so pissed off about, we sure had them write the terms in a way that gives us room to change our minds in future and actually do most of what you are worried about."
Actually, I guess I can't imagine that. They don't have the balls to admit that. They did the standard lawyer-over-the-shoulder thing of calling it all this big misunderstanding, and we really should have just trusted them to be more benevolent all along.
> but there are plenty of internet "lifestyle businesses" that can communicate with their user base much much better.
Like..?
> The guys who accidentally turn their hobby projects into a small, sustainable business for themselves talk to their userbase with a level of candidness that you'll never see from startup guys
I'd really like to know which, so I can learn from them.
>> but there are plenty of internet "lifestyle businesses" that can communicate with their user base much much better.
> Like..?
MetaFilter [1] does an excellent job of owner-moderator-user interaction. Here are some key features:
* Because of the size of the site, they don't have to rely on community moderation - and the moderators they do have do a very patient and professional job. You don't get capricious or childish deletions, you get the feeling moderators think carefully before deleting posts, and they're always willing to explain their decisions. There's nothing like wheel wars or moderators trying to kick out other moderators.
* There's a $5 signup fee so regular bans work - no need for things like hell bans/shadow bans.
* There's a section of the site called 'metatalk' [2] where things like policies, bugs, moderator actions etc can be discussed. Metatalk posts tend to get read by mods pretty quickly; the top post there has a reply from the site's main developer within 2 minutes.
* Between Metatalk and the mods chatting in the site's normal threads, people feel they know the moderators [3]. Matt, the site's owner, seems like a reasonable guy.
As such, people are much less worried that the site's owners are trying to fuck them over - because the site's owners have an established history of not doing that.
It's actions that define an individual or an organisation, and not words. Better would've been an unambiguous policy update that clearly quells people's concerns, without the feel-good corporate messaging.
Trust is easily given, sometimes earned. It is also easily lost, and very hard to re-earn.
Their app is symptomatic of an immature industry in which trivial/fun apps far outnumber and precede useful business/productivity apps. An app in the former category with a cavalier attitude to its users will be dropped first, given the arrival of a worthwhile replacement.
>This whole event shows me (or at least, reminds me) that there are limits to what words can fix.
I think it should show you that there are limits to what people will understand.
This is an APOLOGY from Instagram. It cannot be construed as anything more than a PR Document.
However: their TERMS OF SERVICE are a REAL CONTRACT. Whatever they say about the contract is one thing - once you agree to that contract in a legally binding way, however: thats another thing entirely.
What this should be showing you in all your fascination is how easily people can be duped into thinking that "their company" is 'friendly' after a few pages of words are dumped out into the mob-o-sphere .. and beyond that, it should show you that PR often trumps LEGAL in the public mind -but never in the civic one.
The sentiment reads 'Yeah yeah, we hear you, here's some token feel goods but we're going to continue to forge ahead and hope the idiots among you generate enough positive noise for us to drown out the dissenting signals'.
I understand they need to monetize (god, it's taken HOW LONG!?!? Jesus!), but that doesn't excuse them from intellectual dishonesty. People have genuine concerns and they should be addressed clearly.
I think the market would simply be happy with a 'Creative Commons' default option tbh (like deviantart, flickr etc) with an account or picture level opt-out. Really simple, just put a cherry on this crap. Somewhere.
There is nothing mutually exclusive about running a business and being honest. What exactly are you trying to say about HN and/or startups that would make him out of place here?
> There is nothing mutually exclusive about running a business and being honest.
That's why his comment about "running a business" being a "blanket excuse for intellectual dishonesty in general." seemed offensive to me, as it paints a lot of people with a very broad brush. It seems like the kind of one-liner point scoring one finds on, ahem, other unnamed sites.
If it seems offensive, you're reading the directionality wrong. The closest thing to use as an example, but doesn't exactly fit this situation, is the formal fallacy of affirming the consequent.
Like it or not, we live in a society where "because money" is a reasonable justification for a huge number of otherwise disgusting actions. Acknowledging that not does not imply that if your goal is to make money, you have to do such things.
"To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos."
Weasel words. What's so hard about saying "we wont sell your photos, promise, fingers crossed", unless they actually do want to keep that option open.
I imagine a rock solid guarantee that users photos wont be used without their consent would go a very long way in appeasing people.
"If your internal heuristics say..."
No, when the company TOS say they will appropriate my property for their financial benefit, it is reasonable to assume that they may in fact act accordingly.
The right words can and do go a long way in rectifying mistakes. Weasel words that create even more uncertainty and appear to be hiding an agenda tend to infuriate people.
I've been involved in writing Terms of Service for a few big web sites. The back and forth with the lawyers is of course frustrating. And at the end of the day, you have something that comes off overly broad just to "cover everyones asses" from some future theoretical lawsuit.
So even though the TOS allows it, it was not their intention to actually do it. They're going to go back and revise the wording to be what they actually do intend.
Great apology.
I am always on the lookout for weasel words too, don't get me wrong. The "I am sorry that anyone was offended" apology always rubs me the wrong way, cause the person saying that is not sorry for saying it and doesn't regret saying it, but just sorry for offending. But this apology comes off to me as genuine.
> What's so hard about saying "we wont sell your photos, promise, fingers crossed", unless they actually do want to keep that option open.
This is what's hard about it: The second they sign any kind of commercial agreement for money, no matter what you and I consider "selling", hundreds of litigious a-holes (pardon my french, but I do believe that's the correct description) with their eyes firmly fixed to Facebooks market cap, will decide that today is a great day to get some courts to decide what exactly the words "we", "won't", "sell", "your" and "photos" means. And even if they win (not that there are any winners in such a case), the same thing will happen again the next time they do such an agreement.
I think it's very simple: If they truly believed they would never stoop to those "downright villainous things", they would not need to allow for them in the TOS.
Putting the promise in the actual TOS is much more believable than putting it in a blog post.
"The language we proposed also raised question about whether your photos can be part of an advertisement. We do not have plans for anything like this and because of that we’re going to remove the language that raised the question."
I think they deserve a little patience and a chance to follow through with their promise. When they do, we can see how villainous the terms still are. And if they don't keep their promise, we can call them on it.
Not sure why people think they deserve more of a chance to explain themselves. Even after they already tried. They knew what they were doing when the changed the TOS. It wasn't an overnight decision. They did not take any real blame for the stupid decision to change it. It came off as more of a, i'm sorry you misunderstood, than an i'm sorry we did this. There is a good chance there intentions were not bad, but it was a very poor decision on their part to jump to this level. They are not back peddling hard enough in my useless opinion. I don't think consumers owe it to companies to hear them out. This isn't a tiny app developer who made a mistake in legalese. A team of lawyers just tried to eat our free lunch. Even if their intentions were not evil, if it disagreed with the users, they have a right to walk away.
>Next time read the ToS of every service you use, and feel free to get angry at every single one of them.
Note, getting angry? that is what changes this sort of thing.
Seriously, setting up a ToS is a pain in the ass. If someone that understands the business and the customer isn't involved, if you throw it over the fence to the lawyers, and you don't read it like a user would, this is what it ends up looking like. Hammering out a good ToS is really hard, and it requires effort of someone that cares about the reputation of the company, /and/ hasn't drank so much company kool-aide that they understand that users don't always assume good faith.
These people are harder to find than lawyers. So yeah, setting up a good ToS is hard.
If customers just 'click through' and don't care what the ToS says? guess what businesses are going to do? we are going to throw it over the fence to the lawyers, who are going to write something like this, if they think the VC is their client.
Getting angry is really important, because it's the only way to convince companies to put the effort in to writing a good ToS.
They ask for a license to store, display and publish your content, but this is explicitly limited to the use of operating the service. They need that license so that some user does not sue them for copyright infringement after uploading their own pictures and clicking "share".
Instagram/Facebook take a much broader license, which includes sub-licensing rights to third parties, including for profit and unrelated to the operation of Instagram itself.
I can imagine a better response, but not one that would take significantly longer for lawyers to vet. An ideal response would actually show examples (i.e. "This is an example of your photo being used in conjunction with an advertisement. This is an example of how your photo will never be used"), because as it is, the language is just couched enough that Instagram users, once burned, will be even more suspicious and cynical.
If a lawyer's advice pisses off your users, that isn't a good lawyer. Sure a lawyer can claim that being "conservative" on behalf of their "client's interests" is the best way to act.
That's no longer credible though. The client (Instagram's) interests can be more closely linked now to their user's interests, than was the case before the Internet when a company could write whatever shit they like in legal agreements, and nobody would complain.
> If a lawyer's advice pisses off your users, that isn't a good lawyer.
Sorry, but under universally-accepted legal ethics standards going back centuries, that's not at all how it works.
Lawyers advise, as you say, but ultimately, the client's business people make the call. Sometimes a lawyer will tell a client, "sure, legally you can do this, but you need to be prepared for some significant blow-back," and then the business people decide they'll take that risk. That decision is entirely within the province of the business people; not only can the lawyer do nothing about it, she must remain silent to the outside world about it except in extremely-narrow circumstances.
Few would have it otherwise. Even when we're talking about a public company, few shareholders, let alone managers, would want the company's lawyers --- who typically have never had much first-hand business experience, let alone P&L responsibility --- to be able to overrule a decision by the business people about business issues.
The thing is, most apologies contain the word "sorry." By contrast, this one acknowledges that "[l]egal documents are easy to misinterpret" and that they don't blame us for interpreting "you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your ... photos ... without any compensation to you" as what it sounds like.
The problem is, when reading that "apology" I get the feeling they just admitted they failed to fool their users with the first attempt.
As many stated, the document was not unclear or misinterpreted, it was very explicit.
Now they say they don't want to sell your pictures and will change their ToS to make it clearer. Since it was already clear, the conclusion I made, is that they'll just try hiding those "unclear" statements better.
Hope not, but I don't think they'll give up that "right" so easily.
The majority of Instagram users are nontechnical and have never heard of the TOS change, nor do they care. Letting advertisers put someone's Instagrams on a billboard is a pretty low bar for "villainous".
I think it's amusing that Instagram is, in its own words, "trying to build a viable business", just a few weeks after they sold for a billion.
In short: Instagram is a fun site for sharing silly photos.
Facebook vastly overpaid for it, and the pedantic hacker types on HN and Slashdot vastly overestimate the importance of its new terms.
Exactly. Given they made this mistake, this reaction was exactly the best they could do, short of immediately releasing a new and improved TOS, "better like this?"
It remains to be seen how well they've really listened when they put up their next attempt at writing "easy to misinterpret legal documents".
And after that, the next TOS change, and the next one after that ...
What they should do (IMNSHO) is say "Yup, we're doing what we said we're doing, but - 1) We will never charge you to use the service and 2) If we do sell your photo you will get a 30% cut." Seems to me that would change this from a fail to a WIN in record time...
How about one where the tone was "We over stepped" instead of "You read it wrong".
It's like 343 industries telling users that they didn't receive emails because they had invalid email addresses on their Xbox accounts (which is impossible)...
That said, at least it looks like they're going to tweak the TOS change in favor of their users. But with Facebook pulling the reigns, we all know where this will end.
> The language we proposed also raised question about whether your photos can be part of an advertisement. We do not have plans for anything like this and because of that we’re going to remove the language that raised the question.
Note that he doesn't say "we won't use your photos as part of an advertisement", he merely says "the reason we're removing that language is because we don't [currently] plan on using your photos as part of an advertisement".
I'm sure if they thought of a way they could make money by doing so without losing critical mass, they'd be all over that.
It's a science fiction idea I think, but something that would also fly, given their statements, would be to show photos of people who look like your friends (Facebook have the machine learning / pattern matching capability) in order to influence your decisions; someone who looks like a great crush you had, dining at a nearby restaurant, for example.
This would neither necessarily fit into the classification of 'advertising', nor be showing photos to 'your friends', who would immediately call this kind of behaviour out. This would sorta tally with the fact that photos are public by default AFAIK, and the comments about privacy.
I like how he said "The language we proposed ... " to refer to "Yesterday we introduced a new version of our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service that will take effect in thirty days."
Its neither off-topic nor offensive, and because you don't have downvote privileges you had to comment instead - that's good because now I can respond and hopefully clarify.
It isn't off-topic because it is a direct response to it's parent who was trying to make a point by example that refers to this use of rhetoric
It isn't offensive because it is simply using the loaded question to provide a loaded answer that uses the exact same rhetorical trick to turn the tables. To try to show by example that the point being made is little more than a trick.
It is the nature of a loaded question with an obvious appeal to emotion that makes responses to it seem offensive.
It's a time-weathered rhetorical device, and probably wouldn't be effective if it weren't also somewhat offensive. Although responding to the device is... unusual.
Oh for crying out loud, they did not try to "sneak this by".
Stop trying to cast a simple snafu regarding a ToS as some evil conspiracy.
Remember that the people running this company are you peers. It's disgusting watching the community salivating over burning them all at the stake today.
They're your friends, or just like your friends. Knock it off.
I disagree. This was a carefully worded response. Notice "commit to you that we will be doing more to answer your questions, fix any mistakes, and eliminate the confusion. As we review your feedback and stories in the press, we’re going to modify specific parts of the terms to make it more clear what will happen with your photos." They expected this.
It's a classic move from the Facebook playbook. Push out a far-reaching privacy policy or feature update. Release a message or press release saying that "we're listening". Make token changes and say "we've listened and made changes". And just in case people start to sue, vigorously lobby and donate to government officials to keep the regulatory heat off their backs.
They are trying to get away with as much as they can. These stupid companies are going to be the reason why 10 years from now the Internet is going to be a morass of government regulation.
Don't work for or support companies that act like this. Shame on them. Period.
I wouldn't be surprised if at some point soon you won't be able to register a domain name or start an Internet company without taking a licensing exam.
>I wouldn't be surprised if at some point soon you won't be able to register a domain name ... without taking a licensing exam.
Who would impose such a requirement of licensure? Certainly not the government --- that would be a prior restraint on freedom of speech/press and therefore unconstitutional.
Well, they would first impose it and then somebody sues them and it starts bouncing around various courts for the next 5 years. It would take some serious time until there would be a final ruling.
Man, this is some absolutely insane over the top hyperbole.
No one tried to cast this as a conspiracy, they simply called it what it is, a company monetizing by making the user experience worse.
"Remember that the people running this company are you peers. It's disgusting watching the community salivating over burning them all at the stake today."
I don't know whats craziest here. First, equating "burning them at the stake" to "deleting their accounts on that persons website" is absolute lunacy and I don't know how anyone could take your points seriously. Second, pretending that because these people look like my friends, they should get a free pass on changing their terms to better monetize user content is just lame, just because someone looks like me and is a millionaire doesn't make them immune to incredibly correct criticism.
But most likely it wouldn't make the user experince worse. If anything, it would allow them to avoid banner ads and make the experience better.
That said, sounds like people aren't willing to "agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you."
So people signed up for Instagram under their old terms, where everything quite literally did come to them for free. Now Instagram changed their terms to monetize peoples content. People don't like this and would not have joined originally with these terms. People STILL mock them for "expecting something for free".
Well, when you create the expectation, as Instagram did, that things will come for free, and then you stop fulfilling that expectation, customers will leave. Not sure how long it will take startup founders to understand and it blows my mind how frequently people on HN seem to act like people "owe" a site something for the service they're providing. If I get an invite to your free photosharing site with features X, Y and Z, you're creating an expectation. If you change your offering once you get a ton of users in the hopes of monetizing them, you're changing the offering and these people leaving is justified. The reason they got there in the first place was because of your offering, which you're now changing.
My peers and friends at least would never use my pictures to create ads and in any case, my relations to peer and friends are not based on comprehensive and one-sided ToS …
Your statement doesn't hold true because actual peers call each other out on bad moves, and the failure (or lack of attempt) to find an actual good move.
If we take your words as gospel, then we should be critical of them and we should take action.
This is also because Instagram as a business is not a peer, does not follow advice, and absolutely needs to be burnt at the stake (and salivated over?) to realise it made a mistake.
Remember that the people running this company are you peers. It's disgusting watching the community salivating over burning them all at the stake today. They're your friends, or just like your friends. Knock it off.
-- If not in jest, this is rediculously naive. just FYI.
In the blog post announcing the changes (http://blog.instagram.com/post/38143346554/privacy-and-terms...), they called out a "few key updates." The changes to the TOS were described as, "Our updated terms of service help protect you, and prevent spam and abuse as we grow."
Our "friends" over there sure didn't go out of their way to call out an important change in the TOS. If it wasn't an attempt to sneak this by, it's indistinguishable from one.
> That said, at least it looks like they're going to tweak the TOS change in favor of their users. But with Facebook pulling the reigns, we all know where this will end.
No they're not. This article from the Verge is weird. The important changes are in the copyright license. The instagram blog post is lying by omission.
Look at the former section
"Proprietary Rights in Content on Instagram"
> Instagram does NOT claim ANY ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, applications, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you post on or through the Instagram Services. By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the Instagram Services, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels, except Content not shared publicly ("private") will not be distributed outside the Instagram Services.
This section about copyright has turned into something pretty much like Facebook's:
> Instagram does not claim ownership of any Content that you post on or through the Service. Instead, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post on or through the Service, except that you can control who can view certain of your Content and activities on the Service as described in the Service's Privacy Policy, available here:http://instagram.com/legal/privacy/.
It's funny how thin the ice he's skating on is, when he writes:
>"Ownership Rights: Instagram users own their content and Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos. Nothing about this has changed. We respect that there are creative artists and hobbyists alike that pour their heart into creating beautiful photos, and we respect that your photos are your photos. Period.
I always want you to feel comfortable sharing your photos on Instagram and we will always work hard to foster and respect our community and go out of our way to support its rights."
He should add in brackets that the user has automatically given Instagram "Ownership" of a gold plated license to do whatever the hell it wants with content posted, in case anyone was wondering.
I also noticed that they stepped short of saying they wouldn't be taking a non-exclusive perpetual license for any use out of the ToS. What does "ownership" mean in that case? Only that you can negotiate other deals with third parties.
It can mean that they cannot re-license your work, which is to say you wouldn't have to compete with them in terms of pricing to a third party but I don't know if that is what the ToS says so a closer reading is in order.
Licence is: "non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use"
So I would say "sub-license" means "re-license". It would be very unfortunate to have to compete with Instagram on pricing for your own content to a third party. Or some company that buys Instagram/Facebook out.
Just read this bit:
"To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear."
So I think that clears up the 'sub-licensable' aspect. It doesn't rule out giving them away for free - which come to think of it, would hard to compete with price-wise! I'm really starting to wonder what they had in mind.
> No they're not. This article from the Verge is weird. The important changes are in the copyright license.
A reply from the author of the article in the comments[0]:
> You guys know that I used to be a copyright lawyer, right? This stuff is all boilerplate terms of service — every service from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, etc all have it.
Well, I'm sorry that this guy can't read. I have read many different copyright licenses, and this copyright license is not "boilerplate". You can have very different copyright licenses for such web services. You can get an overview at http://tos-dr.info/topics.html#copyright-scope
His misinterpretation is getting it handed to him and the conflict of interest stuff re: The Verge and Instagram is something else to consider. I wouldn't trust a news outlet with so many close ties to companies like this.
> the conflict of interest stuff re: The Verge and Instagram is something else to consider. I wouldn't trust a news outlet with so many close ties to companies like this.
What are you talking about? Have you read their ethics statement[0] yet?
In the world of journalism, that's a very serious accusation to be making without any evidence.
No, you might want to read it. Here, I'll make it a little easier for you:
> Our company has its own advertising team responsible for selling ad space on our site. We do not accept money or other consideration from companies as a condition or incentive to write a review or story, whether favorable or unfavorable, on The Verge.
> We do not invest in companies that we cover, and employees are forbidden from owning, trading, or buying stock in companies we cover or companies in the general tech sector, without exception.
> We don't take free things from companies, or from their PR firms. This rule is simple and we stick to it
> We do not take free or discounted merchandise
> We do not take free or discounted services.
> Employees of The Verge may not be otherwise employed by or receive compensation from companies that they are likely to cover as part of their news beat, nor are they permitted to have any advisory role (paid or unpaid) at those companies.
> We do not accept any samples on any preconditions, such as, that we will agree to provide a review simply because the company sent us a sample.
"That effectively guts the user's control over the use and exploitation of the photo," says Daniel Schaeffer, an attorney with Neal & McDevitt, a boutique law firm in Northfield, Ill., specializing in intellectual property. "The most obvious and immediate example is the ability to allow businesses to use your photos in advertising, but the actual effects could be even farther-reaching."
> And he is now making more money by not practicing law and as of today, shilling for Instagram.
As I explained to someone else in another comment[0], I suggest you not embarrass yourself any further by making baseless accusations about journalists who take impartiality very seriously.
> What's your point?
That the OP's link's author's professional qualifications are also possessed by the author of the post I linked, making that a moot factor.
He isn't just "in publishing", he frequently writes about legal topics for the Verge. For example, he covered the Google v. Oracle and Apple v. Samsung trials in great detail. However, if you're curious as to why he made the career choices he did, you can always ask him directly: https://twitter.com/reckless
I have no reason at this point to doubt his judgment, as he is clearly quite a capable individual, as he has managed to become the managing editor of one of the top tech news sites in an industry bursting with competition and upstarts.
While I agree that the facebook fears are probably overblown, the TOS' language does not comfort me at all. In fact, I think that the Verge is entirely wrong in that article(IANAL, etc.).
This TOS tweak allows Instagram go sell your content for advertising purposes to a third party. They can use your images, as is, in their advertising(presumably on Instagram, though that is not clear). So they can take payment for your content, without compensating you at all.
That's a pretty huge difference from Facebook's TOS. In there, they state that they will use your content to deliver ads. They're not delivering your content to other parties to be used in their ad campaign.
I particularly appreciate all their statements about "nothing HAS changed" which ring hollow when balanced against the fact that the changes aren't in effect and won't be for 30 days.
Read your source more carefully, and stop selectively quoting. Systrom spoke of formal, written offers. The Twitter offer was a verbal agreement. I do not know my corporate contract law but it would surprise me if these were the same thing.
> Systrom was asked about formal offers. The Twitter offer was a verbal agreement.
Verbal contracts are still contracts. Written form is preferred because it's easier to enforce after-the-fact, not because it's required for legal contracts.
And either way, Systrom would have taken an oath to "tell the truth, and the whole truth". This type of glaring omission over quibbling about whether an offer was a "formal" offer or not would get most in trouble with the courts...
Uh, no. For a verbal agreement to be binding it must pass the same requirements as a written agreement. A few guys discussing a takeover is not a formal takeover offer any more than if they exchanged e-mails about it. I am no expert in securities law but the bar for contractual consideration has got to be very high.
There was a verbal offer with specific dollar amounts ($525 million, in fact), an offer specific enough that Instagram had to back out of it before it was signed. I'm not talking about filling out an SEC-mandated press release, I'm talking about a direct question from state lawyers about whether there were any offers from other companies besides Facebook, and Systrom lied and then tried to employ weasel words about "formal offers" to talk about something else.
Can you at least read the article before talking about generalities of mergers&acquisitions?
What the hell? Responding carefully and specifically to a lawyer's question is not suspicious, it's standard operating practice whenever lawyers are involved. Systrom has no obligation to spill the beans about anything that some guy on the Internet thinks might be called an offer, and courtrooms have rules against assigning malicious interpretations thereunto.
What do you mean they tried to sneak it in? They already had it there in the old TOS but no one bothered to read it, or at least they didn't care when Instagram had full rights to advertise with their photos before.
The new TOS actually limits what they an do more than the old one.
There's something I can't quite put my finger on, that makes this response seem a bit forced and insincere.
"Legal documents are easy to misinterpret. So I’d like to address specific concerns we’ve heard from everyone"
My understanding is that legal documents are written precisely to be as hard to misinterpret as possible. They say exactly what they mean, and (subject to possible judicial interpretation) mean exactly what they say.
I'm sure the average layperson might misunderstand or not realise the consequences or scope of a particular term, but
as I understand it, the original concerns appear to have been raised by an EFF lawyer[1] who presumably does have a reasonable grasp of the matter.
That sets the tone for the piece.
"Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation. This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing. To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos."
We are selling a package. Which might include some photos and some other advertising or whatever services, juicy user data, etc, but we're definitely not selling the photos. Only the package thing.
"Ownership Rights: Instagram users own their content and Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos."
My understanding is that this is irrelevant to everything except maybe attribution; they're granting themselves sufficient rights to transfer & sub-licence the works, which is essentially everything necessary to sell/use/licence a copy. In fact, the existence of a perpetual royalty-free transferable/re-licenceable licence will significantly devalue the content, if the actual owner wanted to sell or exclusively licence the content.
Maybe I'm reading it wrong. But it definitely feels like the Non-Apology-Apology "We're truly sorry that you feel upset about how we're trying to shaft you good & hard."
There was an interesting controversy at Google about ownership of what you worked on in your own time, and their assertion that the carve out in California law about 'having to do with the business' basically covered everything because they were pretty much into everything.
If you read it in a strict legal sense, by signing the employment agreement you agreed to give Google a lifetime perpetual right to anything your worked on at any time during your employment with them. So a cry went up, and the official response was "You know what we meant, we aren't really claiming everything." So I said, "Ok, lets rewrite it then to say that you don't mean everything, you only mean things that are in businesses that Google is actively pursuing, and not things Google isn't pursuing." my intention was to align the legal text with the statement of their intention. Silence. Tried again. Silence. Eventually presented HR with a 'modified agreement' which had the new language, they refused to sign it. So I asked, which is it? To which they said "We stand by what we said, you are reading too much into this." And my lawyer said, "If I was a lawyer and had this on file and decided I really want to use whatever it was you were working on, this language clearly says you agree to them taking it from you without any compensation."
That was when I decided to leave.
I get that it is "simpler" and reduces the companies risk to have that language in there, after all it would be hugely painful to have to compensate someone more than they already did to use something that person wrote, and it keeps folks from creating a business "on the side" and then selling it back later, but there is what they say, and what they do. And what they will do. My lawyer once said, "If they say it doesn't mean that, then have them update it, if they won't then they do mean that, even if they don't want to say it."
A more likely explanation is that Legal didn't want to modify their very-expensively produced and widely-reviewed employment contract for some mere employee. And HR had you figured out as a troublemaker. :-)
You are probably correct. Although to my credit I made sure the language I offered had been previously litigated. One argument offered was that it was "too much trouble" to have a special employment agreement for me and a different one for everyone else. They really meant "too much more trouble" since there were at least 3 revisions of the agreement between the time I started and the time I left. Interesting to read the revisions though and compare them to lawsuits that had transpired. (kind of a sick hobby of mine)
That provision of the agreement wasn't the reason I quit, but it was a little rock in my shoe that never went away until I did.
If you add up the total number of people at Google who have complained about that rock, and the number of people who haven't but would if they were prompted, suddenly "too much trouble" looks a little different, IMHO.
That depends on who you ask and how you look at it.
Google has always insisted that it's only IP that's relevant to Google's business. Critics (such as myself) have always retorted that ANYTHING can be construed to be relevant to Google's business.
The only thing that's materially changed in response to complaints, is that there is now a review committee that you can submit projects to, and after some weeks they can grant you permission to keep the IP.
But if Google actually believes that your specific project is related to their business, you're not going to get an approval. For example, all applications for smartphones are explicitly blanket excluded.
A friend recently spoke to his lawyer about an employment agreement, and the advice he got (this is 3rd hand by now mind you) was basically "if the terms are otherwise favorable to you, don't worry about the parts that are clearly unenforceable".
I was thinking the same, but really the advice hinges on two things, the first is the term 'unenforceable' and the second is the cost of litigation. In my case I went back and forth with my lawyer on whether or not their wording was enforceable in California and his advice was that given that California is a right to work state, and they explicitly remind you they can fire you for any reason, and disagreeing about ownership isn't protected by the right to work law (like discrimination is), if you're suing them you're not working for them (they will fire you), and if you really think there is a chance that something you might work on in your spare time could be "valuable" than the best thing to do would be to quit. Very unambiguous that.
It really depends on the jurisdiction. If very similar clauses have already been tested and thrown out in the appropriate court, then sure, you don't need to worry about them.
If a lawyer is advising you that something is unenforceable, they're probably right.
"Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation. This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing. To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos. [But these changes means we could if we wanted]"
"Ownership Rights: Instagram users own their content and Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos. [Not that it matters]"
>My understanding is that legal documents are written precisely to be as hard to misinterpret as possible.
In this case, the issue is that legal documents are written to be as cover-your-ass as possible. Instagram needs a license for your content to show it on their site. Then a lawyer says "what if Facebook sells Instagram to someone else?". So they add a bit that makes it a transferable license. That was easy! But then someone who is not trying to cover Instagram's ass reads it and says "that means they can sell the rights to my photo." And that's true. It wasn't the intent of the lawyers but the lawyers really had no intent regarding protecting the user's rights. They're just watching out for Instagram.
It is the responsibility of someone in the company (not necessarily a lawyer) to think about how those legalistic terms would look before they were unleashed on the public. The company is now big enough to know better. The changes to the TOS that are promised in the blog post should have been made up front, not in response to a PR disaster.
"My understanding is that legal documents are written precisely to be as hard to misinterpret as possible."
Actually it depends on the circumstances. Sometimes you want to be precise and sometimes you want to be ambiguous depending on what you are trying to achieve.
Semi legal example: Let's say you are offering people email accounts with a web hosting service. You can be precise and say "you can have up to a million email accounts" or you can be less precise and say (believe it or not) "unlimited". If you say the latter you can then define imprecisely what you mean by "unlimited". If you specify a number you will box yourselves in. Same with customer support or a host of other things. Precision sometimes works against you. (Corrected I said the opposite before edit.)
Another example. Let's say you have a display of free utensils (plastic like at a fast food restaurant). You can say "take no more than 10 ketchup packs" and you will probably end up getting more waste then if you say nothing. In that case, precision works against you.
> legal documents are written precisely to be as hard to misinterpret as possible
legal documents reuse diction that has been ruled on and has court established precedent, which creates a bias towards diction which ended up in court in the first place.
i read that in a HN comment somewhere, sorry, no citation.
That's a very interesting "survival of the most litigated" sort of evolution. I wonder how much of a given document is unnecessary evolutionary baggage copy & pasted because it's part of That Standard Clause. I'd love to read more if you happen to recall the comment/story
There are several variations of "Our real intention is....", "we are aiming for...." in this post. Instagram users really need to realize that "Actual TOS agreement" trumps a thousand "our real intention...." blog posts.
Plus as other posters have pointed out there are some pretty clear giveaways in the Phrasing of some of the denials. In the very first paragraph is " Since making these changes, we’ve heard loud and clear that many users are confused and upset about what the changes mean...."
Basically saying that our changes were not bad it is the users that are confused.
I don't think Instagram/Systrom had any intention to sell user photos or do anything as drastic as the blogosphere made its TOS changes sound.
It did the right thing responding so quickly to user feedback. Hopefully it'll result in a TOS that lets Instagram monetize without infringing on the privacy of its users.
> Hopefully it'll result in a TOS that lets Instagram monetize without infringing on the privacy of its users.
And maybe just maybe they will review further TOS changes before unleashing them. If these terms were really against Instagram's plans, it's almost even more pathetic.
I agree. There is a lot of attention paid to TOS changes lately. How could they not see that this would come with heavy backlash? I know he keeps saying "not our intention" in that post, but intentions don't amount to anything if the TOS clearly gives them carte blanche with your photos. Just some really bad public relations going on there.
After reading some of the TOS changes and this blog post it really seems like a case of overzealous lawyering - trying to cover Instagram for all possible uses of the photos.
I'd like to see a site/service along the lines of http://www.tldrlegal.com/ but which crowdfunded some decent lawyers to review the ToS, privacy policy, etc of popular sites (determined by user votes) and provided a list of potentially objectionable statements.
Not as Proper Noun Legal Advice, but more as a set of things which might be a concern, and you should have your own qualified legal counsel examine in detail if desired)
I can think of all sorts of problems though; malpractice, negligence, copyright infringement of ToS, libel for misinterpretations, and many more besides. Maybe that's why it doesn't (can't?) exist.
The legal text, i.e., the announced new ToS, remain relevant, in particular since the ToS rule out suing Instagram (you have to revert to arbitration). I therefore see today's announcement as an important first step but an amendment to the announced new ToS has to follow suit if Instagram really takes this matter serious from a legal perspective.
The blogosphere will always make things sound worse than they are. But was it really that exaggerated this time. I don't think there intentions were as bad as it came off, but they made a huge mistake. There response was honestly not all that fast considering the instant shit storm this caused. If a million users complain about something immediately after it hits the feeds, and it takes them literally hours to say much of anything about it, there's an issue. The apology was not heartfelt, it wasn't sincere, and came off far more like like, "we're sorry you didn't understand."
I think instagram/facebook should be able to monetize, but I think today marks a gigantic mistake in their history, they went down in myspace fashion. Users dropping like flies, the amount of traffic on services like instaport.me and http://freethephotos.com/ is phenemonal.
They want to use your pictures to sell products to your friends. Say you take a picture of your friends at Domino's Pizza. They can show that picture to your friends and say "Look this guy who you know loves our pizza. Come try it out." Now you may not mind making an endorsement. But with this plan they don't have to ask you for permission. They can just do it.
And if you turn out to be a hit they can use it to sell the pizza to everyone not just your friends.
And if you're really a hit, they can use it to sell underwear. Or adult diapers. Or contraceptives. Or whatever you might not like them to use your imagery to sell.
> "They can show that picture to your friends and say "Look this guy who you know loves our pizza. Come try it out.""
They actually can't. There's a world of difference between using a photo to depict an event, and using a photo to endorse.
"Domino's is featuring $5 large pizzas, here's your friend Bob at Domino's last week!" is legal.
"Look at Bob who loves our pizza, come try it out!" is not, unless Bob has signed off on it. You've crossed the line into commercial endorsement, which is a civil suit waiting to happen.
Now, there could potentially be an argument that depicting Bob at Domino's next to a paid message by Domino's is implied endorsement - that's something Instagram will have to figure out. IANAL, though I have studied commercial vs. editorial usage of photography reasonably deeply.
Using someone to endorse a product is a legally non-trivial proposition. It's not as simple as "we can use your photo here".
I fail to see the difference between the two examples. They both imply endorsement.
In both cases, Dominoes has paid Instagram to promote its product. In both cases, Instagram has taken a photo of Bob (taken by Bob? Taken by a friend of Bob's?) And attached it to a marketing effort on behalf of Dominoes. In neither case does the photo's subject (Bob) or its author (Bob?) have a say over the photo's use.
The difference is that one case is clearly explicit: when the ad says "Bob likes our pizza", Bob liking your pizza is an explicit endorsement. The other is more statement of fact: that Bob ate there. For all you know he could have hated it.
On the other hand, add the context of Facebook. What if Bob hit the like button in facebook? You could argue that hitting the button is an endorsement. Or perhaps if the ad is only displayed in a Facebook context where "like" is understood to mean pushing a button on a page, you could argue that the traditional meaning of "like" doesn't apply so it's not an endorsement.
Indeed, and that's the subtle (but significant) difference. I've noticed for example that in my Facebook feed it never says "Bob likes Pizza Hut", it says instead "Bob liked a page: Pizza Hut".
It certainly goes into a gray area - but something as explicitly as "Bob likes Domino's! You should get Domino's too!" is a legal minefield I doubt anyone would willingly wade into.
Yeah they could put your picture on the Domino's box, saying "Internet users eat here!" and all your friends think "What a dork." Pretty embarrassing and they didn't have to say one word about who you are or what you actually said. They can use the picture because you said they could. And I am not a lawyer, and bet that you aren't either. :-)
Agree. It's pretty obvious where they are going with this. And from an advertiser's perspective, it's pretty sweet. Right now, the distinction they are trying to draw seems to be that they'll only use you to advertise things that you choose to follow.
But what's to stop them from your "implicit" endorsements of products/services you use from location data or with machine vision (something Google can already do with many logos in Street View imagery, I've discovered in my reporting)? Oh, that's right. Nothing. Which is why they don't want to have to ask for permission to do these things.
A possible negative scenario: They grant themselves these rights and then get spun off / acquired by someone with malicious intent. The rights never expire... Can you guarantee that your company will respect the rights of users a decade from now? A century?
Also, you now can't ever sell exclusive rights[1], because there's a perpetual sub-licence capable party floating about out there.
[1] IANAL, but I think that's how it would work; for any licenceable aspect which you wish to grant exclusively, they can grant the same to one or more others, making it non-exclusive.
This is a completely different style of incident response than parent company Facebook's. I much prefer this (relatively) straight up approach, although I'll admit it's more likely to come back and bite them in the arse a few years down the line.
I'm not saying it will, but that it's more likely to. No-one knows what technology brings to the table.
Eg. "it is not our intention to sell your photos"
But what if some kickass image analysis startup emerges that can mine valuable data from billions of pics. And then sell that data. So, just like Twitter with its firehose, Instagram licences its data to 3rd parties. They've just ruled that out (except they haven't, because licensing something is legally different to selling it, if not in substance).
It's a lawyer's job to leave terms as much in their client's favour as they can get away with. It would be foolish to close avenues for no reason. There's a balancing act with PR but overall I think Instagram were just unlucky here and handled it well.
I absolutely agree, the legal Terms of Service (ToS) are relevant and not some blogging about intensions. The legal text is in particular important because according to the ToS, you are now allowed to sue Instagram but you have to revert to arbitration.
>> The language we proposed also raised question about whether your photos can be part of an advertisement. We do not have plans for anything like this and because of that we’re going to remove the language that raised the question. Our main goal is to avoid things like advertising banners you see in other apps that would hurt the Instagram user experience. Instead, we want to create meaningful ways to help you discover new and interesting accounts and content while building a self-sustaining business at the same time. ---- <<<
.
This whole time, I was thinking, "whatever they do, they won't back away from this language...why else would they drop a bombshell if they weren't willing to suffer the blowback"...And it turns out, it was just some optional path they were considering and thought, "what the hell, let's just put in there for now, no biggie"
???
Is that seriously the mindset of a billion dollar company? All I can imagine is:
1) They are lying
2) They really thought people wouldn't read the TOS (hasn't Facebook learned by now that someone will read it and make a big deal about troubling language?)
3) They are an incredibly careless company who will make other "mistakes" that could harm users.
I had been mostly ambivalent about this whole thing, as I don't maintain a very active Instagram account. But now I might just put in the energy to delete my account.
There seems to be a disconnect between the TOS and this statement. If/when it comes down to brass tacks, a legal agreement between the Instagram and its users trumps a blog post about intentions. Talk is cheap -- codify the intentions expressed in the blog post in a TOS revision before the current changes take effect.
This was exactly what I stuck with me. Intention can be either direct or indirect. So they could sell something as a package, which would be indirectly selling something, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_(criminal_law) . I'm no lawyer, but it does sound like that statement had the once over by a few.
One of the main reasons these documents don’t take effect immediately, but instead 30 days from now, is that we wanted to make sure you had an opportunity to raise any concerns.
I see, they learned quite a bit from politicians. First push for the extremes, and if you get buried by bad press, produce a watered-down compromise.
Still, it is a surprisingly fair statement from a Facebook owned company.
Is it bad press? Or free advertising for their new features for promoting accounts? I don't think there was any downside to making the TOS changes the way they did.
The language we proposed also raised question about whether your photos can be part of an advertisement. We do not have plans for anything like this and because of that we’re going to remove the language that raised the question.
Interesting use of the present tense in the second sentence, in an "I am not having an affair with that woman" sort of way.
Does anyone else find the phrasing "Legal documents are easy to misinterpret. So I’d like to address specific concerns we’ve heard from everyone..." to be eerily similar to Dr. Breen's PSAs in the beginning of Half-Life 2?
Dr. Breen: "Let me read a letter I recently received. 'Dear Dr. Breen. Why has the Combine seen fit to suppress our reproductive cycle? Sincerely, A Concerned Citizen.' Thank you for writing, Concerned. Of course your question touches on one of the basic biological impulses, with all its associated hopes and fears for the future of the species. I also detect some unspoken questions. Do our benefactors really know what's best for us? What gives them the right to make this kind of decision for mankind? Will they ever deactivate the suppression field and let us breed again? Allow me to address the anxieties underlying your concerns, rather than try to answer every possible question you might have left unvoiced."
I don't want "innovative advertising that feels appropriate on Instagram" any more than I want what Facebook has done with advertising in my timeline. Please just give me an option to pay a monthly fee to turn all that garbage off.
I've paid for and really enjoyed Flickr's Pro service for years. The fact that they just released a really nice app made it easy to kill my Instagram account once and for all today (I'd thought about it when they first got acquired by Facebook, but never followed through).
I posted something similar on here[1] about how Instagram cannot sell its users photos and what they're actually doing is trying to monetize similar to how Facebook does Sponsored Posts.
Instagram's terms of service stated that was their intentions:
To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.
And "Section 106: Exclusive rights in copyrighted works aka. 17 U.S.C. § 106"[3] essentially states Instagram cannot sell its users photos and it cannot use its users photos and alter them in any meaningful way.
The problem was how they communicated the change and they've admitted that too[2] although they've started to fix this with this blogpost and will continue to communicate this.
At my last job, our Director of Operations was responsible for rewriting the company rulebook/handbook. People didn't really know why, since we were a small company and I don't think anyone had ever read the handbook. Obviously, as you can imagine from someone with the title of Director of Operations, no one was asked for input.
A few weeks later, we;re all given copies of the handbook and ordered to sign it. People read the handbook and it was very clear that the new rules were not in line with company culture at all. No drinking in the office when we had multiple beer fridges, stuff about how you can be fired with less notice, etc. Of course, no one in their right mind would agree to an amended rulebook while at a company, especially when they could freely move to another startup.
The thing that amazed me most though, was in our next company meeting, people kept asking the Director of Operations about the rulebook and he finally snapped to say "Look, I made some changes, if you dont like them, its just really not a big deal, I don't think the rulebook actually means anything anyway".
Okay so lets recap. Our director of operations spent months writing a "meaningless" document? Doubtful. If so, why WRITE the document at all? This is the parallel I see here. There was no reason whatsoever to change the terms, yet they had some presumably high priced lawyers rewrite them. Why would they do this? Do we really believe they spent time an effort updating these terms for no reason? To me, this reads as some SERIOUS backpedaling and I would be shocked if they actually didn't intend to use data in the exact way people were upset they would.
Great, now all the bitching can change to be about their plans to advertise. The sense of entitlement that people have is getting ridiculous. Why do you deserve an absolutely free service?
We (consumers) deserve to have an honest description of how our data is and will be used. We also deserve to receive the service we signed up for and not have the ToS switched on us midway through the lifecycle of the product. The fact that that is happening is dishonest, and is called a "bait and switch" in most other industries.
>We also deserve to receive the service we signed up
No you don't. They can shut the whole thing down and don't owe you a damn thing.
If you don't like the new ToS, when they switch to them and an accept/decline option comes up in the app you can feel free to decline and delete the app.
I don't generally mind free services adding whatever advertising or other things they want, but imo it gets into considerably different territory when there's anything like a transfer of ownership or substantive licensing of ownership-like rights. Those kinds of transfers should be very explicit, where users consciously and knowingly agree, "yes, I agree to license this content for [x,y] use". Of course, Instagram claims they didn't do that here (though EFF's lawyers seem to disagree).
For example, I use Flickr as a free service, and I don't think they owe me anything. They could add advertising if they want, they could remove the free tier and shut down my account if I don't pay, they could shut down the service entirely, etc. That's all well within their rights, since they run the service. But imo it's a qualitative difference from those kinds of changes if they were to add new ToS terms claiming ownership or ownership-like rights over my photographs. That's very different because it can actually damage my career outside their service if I fail to notice the relevant ToS change and they grab some rights I didn't intend to license to them.
No one is asking for a free service. But businesses are giving it. I don't see why businesses deserve to monetize my private information. I'd gladly pay for a feature-rich gmail or facebook where my privacy was guaranteed. But no business is standing up to take my money.
I don't think users feel that way. What they want is to be acknowledged and respected for helping build the server to what it is today. No users = no service. Don't sell us out just because you chose to take money and sell for a cool bil.
The users didn't help build anything. Instagram built a cool service, and the users used it. They didn't build anything.
Now obviously network effects help something like this grow, but don't kid yourself. They aren't running a charity. They are running a business. At some point you have to start making money or the service just goes away. Then all that those amazing users "built" will be gone in a second when they flick the power switch.
They aren't running a charity, you're right about that. But I think they misrepresented their business by giving it away for free, knowing full-well that it won't be sustainable in the long run under that model. Their response? "Oh ok, no problem, we'll just switch the terms of use while nobody is looking."
You could characterize it that way, or you could assume that all of your users aren't complete fools and realize at some point they will have to make money to pay for the costs of running the service. They also know full-well that it isn't sustainable to run this service for free forever.
They know and they don't care. It's not a customer's prerogative to worry about how a company makes money. As much as people like Instagram, if it disappeared or went under, people would move on and forget about it. I would say that the onus is on the company to find a way to monetize that does not insult, mislead, or deride their users.
How does adding ads "insult, mislead, or deride their users"? This whole discussion is silly. 99% of the users will keep happily using the service with ads. They were smart enough to know they were coming eventually. A 1% very vocal minority will piss and moan on internet message boards about how pissed they are and how absurd it is that this coming isn't continuing to give away a nice service.
Everyone bitched when Facebook added ads, but guess what, they keep growing and people keep using it. Shocking.
There is no lie. They offer the service for free. Nobody said they would never ever add ads. That's just being silly. What possible reason could people have for being angry with someone adding ads to this thing they are giving away for free.
Just because a company offers a service for free does not give it the (moral) right to try to sneak in changes to what you signed up for as a customer. Unfortunately, legally they can pretty much do whatever they want as long as they include enough fine print that nobody ever reads in the ToS. I think you are arguing from a legal perspective, which you're absolutely right about; I'm talking about "the right way to treat your customers" perspective.
If I as a customer pay any amount (including $0.00) and agree to the terms of service, the company should honor those terms, or, at the very least, be forthcoming with how they will handle my data.
The reason people are angry is because:
a) They didn't have any inclination of how Instagram will try to monetize. I think you are giving users way too much credit in how these startups work (ask your non-tech-savvy friends how Facebook or Google make money; I guarantee you will get blank stares). The customers who joined before Facebook took over signed a completely different set of ToS. Again, there is nothing obliging them legally to grandfather these customers, but it's not a nice thing to do "Thanks for the ToS. Btw, Facebook took over, so good luck!"
b) They tried to sneak in the changes and got caught. Nobody likes to have stuff done behind their back, so a big announcement with enough lead time to switch services would be nice. I don't use Instagram anyway, but I think this applies in general in how to treat your customers.
That seems unlikely. They're still using Facebook. A few thousand people are paying App.net $50 a year and a billion people are using Facebook. I suspect people would rather have a few ads in their Instagram feed than start paying Flickr. Just a very vocal minority pissing and moaning because they can.
Really? Only 5 days ago this was on the front page of HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4917689. And what about the complaints of Twitter and Facebook ads? You can't say that people don't whine about companies monetizing via advertising.
The big psychological difference is that they are taking something that was free and then starting to charge/advertise versus having it be that way from the start. Kinda like how people would get annoyed if they have to pay to use the bathroom, or for napkins at a restaurant. Or checking you bags on an airplane. It's about setting expectations.
The other thing is that a lot of people use Instagram to share photos they only want their close friends seeing, so people are more sensitive about privacy changes.
No. I'll hold my judgement until I see the new TOS, but what they propose in this blog post is much more reasonable. If the new TOS reflect that, I see little reason to bitch about it.
To late they lost my trust when facebook brought them, and even rumours of facebook behaviour was enough to walk away.
My account is now gone, same with atleast a dozen people I've talked to in the last day or so. I'd hazard a guess the quick response has been in response to sudden surge in accounts deleted.
What blows my mind about this whole mess is how quickly this community has gone off on some witch hunt. Just read the comments. This is apparently what you have to look forward to if your startup is successful and you eventually try to monetize. Good luck everyone.
Boo hoo, the multi-millionaires are getting insulted when they try to fuck their users!
Won't someone please think of the feelings of the millionaires!
I'm pretty sure they can wipe away their tears with $100 bills and their feelings won't suffer permanent damage. Since their feelings are so much more important than all of the people they are trying to fuck over.
Are you an adult? These are your peers not billionaire bankers leeching off the backs of the poor. You know, programmers, marketers, entrepreneurs. They made it. And you want to tear them down because they've been successful? Now that they have money they are automagically evil? What planet am I on?
That CEO is Kevin Systrom, my peer because he is a programmer and entrepreneur. Your whole argument is baseless. He wrote Instagram with his partner Mike Krieger.
Who made the call to fuck the users? Whoever it was, fuck that guy.
Instagram is a company. The leaders are responsible for that unethical behavior and I'm not going to excuse them out of some bullshit appeal to programmer loyalty.
The fact that these are peers is MORE reason for us to be calling them out. Do you really want your profession to be associated with this sleazy behavior? They are poisoning the well for all of us.
Tech people today have the power and money to reshape the entire world. Yet so many of them are focused on extracting a few dollars through grossly unethical behavior. This is not praiseworthy behavior in any sense and you should be ashamed of yourself for defending it.
If my peers are going to be as sleazy and ethically bankrupt as, say, politicians or wall street bankers then I don't want them as peers. I would gladly throw them under the bus to protect the reputation of all tech people.
Exactly what part of "you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your ... photos (along with any associated metadata), ... without any compensation to you" is "confusing"?
It is not complicated legalese; on the contrary it is admirably terse and lucid English. The reason that "it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation" is because that is EXACTLY what it says they will do.
Unambiguous. Not confusing. What's confusing is that Kevin Systrom now claims it does not say what it very clearly and unambiguously says.
<rant>
I really have no idea what people are complaining about. What are you putting in your Instagram photos? It's a cool service that lets you share pictures with friends. What is it that you think your pictures are worth?
When you sign up for a free service, you have to know that you are the product. PERIOD. Don't sign up for free services if you don't want to be the product. Go pay flickr. They will take your money. Stop bitching about free services adding ads so that they can keep the lights on and keep offering your free service.
</rant>
It's a shame this is the case. Isn't it part of the point of legal documents to be hard to misinterpret? Isn't that supposed to be why they use such stiff language?
It's difficult to believe that the language of the ToS communicates things they 'don't intend', Especially following this potential Twitter-acquisition / possible perjury situation.
Also, lets not forget that this is not a startup talking to us anymore--this is a Facebook-owned company. I would expect Facebook to take full advantage of their intentionally vague legal wording.
Although with that said, they don't need to stop the bleeding as much as shut up the major negative press about it, and this statement will probably do that.
Actually the reason legal documents are written in a quirky funny dialect is to make them less ambiguous, not more so. If they are, whoever's written them is doing it wrong.
In today's social environment, the way people are made to feel like customers/users, only to later be sold as product, with little regard to privacy and/or control over their data and profile, isn't it funny how people are starting to assume the worst?
In all fairness, except for that bad start, later on you write the confusing language was your mistake, so you probably meant to say "Legal documents are hard to write, especially when people actually read them".
> Ownership Rights Instagram users own their content and Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos.
Um, yeah. What's "Ownership Rights"? It's not a legal term. Yet you capitalized and bolded the term. I'm sure you didn't mean to say "Copyrights" because you know what those are very well and take great care to not mention them. Also you can't have meant "Personality Rights" because they're generally non-transferable.
On the other hand, at least you acknowledged the public's reaction. And rather quickly, at that. That's good.
You also say you're listening and will improve the wording of the TOS. How that will turn out remains to be seen, when it happens. If so, I hope you'll excuse my skepticism.
Another way to approach this might be to ask yourself specifically what uses you as a user do not want Instagram to pursue with your photos. Then look at the TOS and assess whether the TOS give you any protection against those uses. If the TOS do not protect against those uses then you can tell Instagram directly via feedback what you do not want them to do with your photos. It is easier to amend the TOS by adding specific, unambiguous restrictions on certain uses than it is to try to define the full scope of the permissions to users using random examples.
To restate this another way: Instead of trying to imagine everything Instagram might be permitted to do under the TOS, imagine what you as a user do not want them to do, and then ask for explicit restrictions on those uses.
What the blogosphere seemed to miss when getting all crazy about Instagram selling their pictures to businesses for advertising: what business in their right mind would want the bad press that would go along with exploiting Instagram users? The first time a business used a user's picture without their knowledge, the Internet would go crazy with rage, and rightfully so. It was never going to work that way, because businesses wouldn't want to be part of that game any more than the users would.
The FUD that CNet was able to perpetrate far outweighs any reasonable outcome that I can foresee. For this reason, I take Kevin at his word: both that they aren't going to do stupidly publish user pics on the side of buses, and that they will learn from this blunder.
I guess you still need to work on your language, Can't you just use clear sentences with straight meanings ?
e.g.
> we respect that your photos are your photos. Period
wouldn't it be better to just say "we are not going to use your photos without your permission ? "
It's odd. The vast majority of Instagram users seem to leave their accounts open to the public - more so that most photo-sharing services I've used in the past. Instagram presumably has business relationships with all sorts of entities. And Instagram has APIs allowing users to access the data exposed by these public galleries. It seems the pieces are already in place for a 3rd party to enter into a business relationship with Instagram to pay for access to the data contained in their users photos. Why were the new terms even necessary?
Why don't they just offer to share some of the profit of selling/using the photos? I think this would gain more users who would not mind being in promotional post, as long as they get a cut.
I think that a possible positive side effect of all this is that customers might start realising that they actually would rather pay for web-based software.
Let’s say a business wanted to promote their account to gain more followers and Instagram was able to feature them in some way.
Isn't this just exactly how facebook fooled the world? You pay x to gain y followers and when they have bleed that river dry, they roll out another update that requires you to pay z if you want your posts to show up in their feed?
Seems to me this is a test. Push the updated terms of service out, if no-one complains, or if there is only minimal response then cool, it's acceptable by the users. If complainst come around, mitigate that risk by issuing an apology afterwards. As the phrase goes - " Do What You Think Is Right & Apologize Later "
The more interesting question is what is Instagram planning to do that caused this change in terms of service. I would bet that they are going to group photos together that show off a product or to attach advertising around your photos based on location or what the photo shows. I think that they are doing this soon.
I like this response. Terms of Service often need to change over time and, as of late, the Internet seems to have made a game out of ripping the changes to shreds when put forward by a known brand.
I'm looking forward to seeing how companies handle ToS changes moving forward. Is there a way to avoid the backlash altogether?
Err, write TOSes that are not a land grab of other people's intellectual private property and/or private data? You make it sound like it is unreasonable to care about that.
If they had said we're setting up a market to sell Instagram photos. You can opt-in any of your photos, we'll take a cut for running the service, and you get the rest. The problem would be filtering out the junk, not getting people to sell their cat pictures.
For those that would still like to easily move their Instagram images to Flickr, without exporting to a zip then reimporting,we built a small webapp that will allow you to do so only a few clicks.
It's already been pointed out that the Verge ignored several important pieces of the ToS when writing that article - take a look at the comments both on HN (for other articles) and The Verge to see.
Is it just me who feels that it is just a re-run of the classic 'Zuck' way of doing things: Make mistake and apologize when it blows up? What's happening inside the company is any outsider's guess, but I definitely don't feel reassured.
Hopefully the take-away is an explanation would have been helpful when the ToS was changed. Everyone was given limited information and they interpreted it how they could.
Maybe sites will think about this next time they quietly changed their ToS.
If they needed an explanation to say "the terms say this, but we don't really mean it" then perhaps they should just not release a ToS with stuff they don't actually mean.
It's little comfort for a company to say "oh the contract says X, but don't worry it's not true".
The take-away here is to actually properly review the ToS in light of "how might a user interpret this" not in "how can we make sure we have the absolute most coverage on our side".
I am happy with this apology. Everyone loves to hate on something, once one person starts hating others join in the mob mentality against someone or an entity continues until it gets to the point where the arguments have lost sight of what they were originally arguing about. What kind of apology were people expecting? An apology using animated GIF's and infographics?
Considering the photo quality of Instagram photos is extremely questionable, are people really upset that a photo of the nicoise salad they had could be used in an ad for for promotional purposes? Please. 99.9% of the photos on Instagram wouldn't be fit for advertising considering they're most shots of insecure teenagers taking photos in the mirror and the rest pictures of food.
Kevin Systrom is the man. To be acquired, be part of a public company and still respond quickly, succinctly and effectively their monetization plan is something a lot of companies can learn from.
I deleted my Instagram account and won't be going back. Flickr's new mobile apps and their much more user-friendly TOS is where was before Instagram and where I want to be in the future.
Same here. I'm also working on deleting my FB account. That one is a lot harder to do because so many of the small businesses and artists that I follow have abandoned maintaining their own blog/website in favor of just using FB.
tumblr seems to be doing quite well just letting users promote their posts. instagram could be moving that direction, not just for businesses. i guess they have facebook doing it from the business side, though, so it is natural for them
Easy to misinterpret by people who aren't lawyers and judges is the implication. But when actual lawyers come out and warn you about what it really means, you need to be concerned.
When you're getting into bed with Facebook, writing poor terms of service in the same week that you lie about acquisition offers is a pretty damn good way of souring the well. If they revise the ToS and remove the offending sections, good, but for some, it will already be too late.
These mistakes are so common among billion dollar corporations. Can they not anticipate these sort of reactions? Do they get 'Larry' down in legal to quickly write something up and then post it without another thought?
However, judging from the responses here, a lot of Instagram users are unappeasable, and I don't think unreasonably. Their motives are basically unknowable by anyone not in their inner circle, so all we have to go on is their actions and their words. If your internal heuristics say that when it looks like a social media company is trying to steal your personal data/intellectual property, they probably are and will then lie about it after the fact... well, that seems like a reasonable heuristic to have this day and age. I'm not sure I buy into it unreservedly, but I wouldn't try to convince anyone they're wrong about it, either.
This whole event shows me (or at least, reminds me) that there are limits to what words can fix.