That Recent Copyright Case Lost Against Instagram and Mashable...

A federal court recently ruled that a photographer had no case against Mashable, which embedded her copyright-registered Instagram photograph into their advertising even though she had explicitly denied them a license to do so.

The wording of Instagram's use agreement is actually pretty clear that they can sub-license anything posted in a "public" account. But experienced photo-attorney Ed Greenberg and experienced commercial photographer Jack Reznicki have examined the court documents and provided their own practical opinions in their Copyright blog (which we all should be reading on a regular basis).

http://thecopyrightzon​e.com/?p=2020

Even more importantly Instagram have come out and publicly stated that (while they have the right to sub license under the ToS) users of its embedding feature don't get licenses from Instagram to display photos and that you would need to get such a license from the actual copyright owner.

So where do Mashable stand now? The judge says a licence exists but the licensor (Instagram) says otherwise.

Ah, social media. Everyone is so excited about posting everything & anything on the web for their 10 seconds of fame and a few affirmative likes. How cool am I? You can keep your likes!! I can't tell you how many times I've been criticized (mostly by younger folk) that I'm a professional photographer w/o facebook, instagram, snapchat, twitter,...….. I have a website & an email, that's it. It hasn't hurt me a bit.

My wife is amazing! She is very proud of her husband & thinks it's a shame that no one sees my images but her & I (I mean pics I take for fun, not the paper). She very much wants to show her friends images I take, especially after they hear for 2 weeks about the jumping spiders I just took in as pets. Facebook, et al, is the devil. Track everything & steal everything. So when I edit an image I save it twice. Once for me @ high res & another at very low res. When I do give her an image (rarely) it is very low res. And when I do give her a photo, I know I have just given it away. And you all should look at it the same way. Once you press that "enter" button, you have zero recourse!

I'm sorry, I was too dramatic when I said "zero recourse". You can always sue Zuckerberg.

Dan Marchant wrote in post #19074389
Even more importantly Instagram have come out and publicly stated that (while they have the right to sub license under the ToS) users of its embedding feature don't get licenses from Instagram to display photos and that you would need to get such a license from the actual copyright owner.

So where do Mashable stand now? The judge says a licence exists but the licensor (Instagram) says otherwise.

As I understand from the first case, Instagram explicitly did give a sub-license to Mashable.

I think they have made a decision not to do that anymore, despite the ToS giving them that right.