06/09/2020

Instagram’s Surprise Headache for Digital Publishers

Copyright is a complicated beast on the internet

Copyright is a complicated beast on the internet—and it could threaten to get a whole lot more complicated in the coming years, thanks to a pair of legal decisions and an ensuing policy change on the part of Instagram.

It’s a saga any association that embeds social media content on their platforms should be aware of.

Here’s what happened. A few years ago, the news site Mashable used a photo by a photographer, Stephanie Sinclair, in a fairly sneaky way: After Sinclair declined to license her photo to Mashable for $50, the publisher got around this by using an Instagram embed of the same photo, essentially piggybacking off of Instagram’s license to republish the photo.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.