Instagram: photo embedding does not automatically mean copyright protection – IT Pro – News

Instagram says that photos posted to sites via an embed don’t automatically comply with copyright. The embed api is not covered by the company’s sub-licenses for lawfully sharing photos, says parent company Facebook.

In theory, it is therefore necessary that website administrators first ask permission from an Instagram user before embedding their photo on a site. Administrators who fail to do so may violate the copyright of the poster.

Instagrams parent company Facebook says in an email to Ars Technica that it does not automatically assign the rights to an embed. Users automatically assign copyright to their photos to Instagram when uploading. Until now, Instagram embedders implicitly agreed to copyright if they embed a photo via the api, but now the company declares that it doesn’t.

“Our terms and conditions give us the right to sub-license, but we don’t grant that for our embed APIs,” Instagram said in the statement. “Our policy states that third parties must obtain the necessary rights from the copyright holders. This includes having a license to share the content if required by law.”

The statement follows two different lawsuits that photographers had filed against the media. In April, photographer Stephanie Sinclair filed a lawsuit against Mashable. Mashable had embedded a photo of the photographer with an article. Sinclair argued that the site violated her copyright, but the judge did not agree.

A second lawsuit by photographer Elliot McGucken against Newsweek magazine was about the same. A judge said of that earlier this week, however that Instagrams terms and conditions allowed embedding a photo just like that.

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