On a recent trip to Florida I took a picture of a neon sign. I made a few edits to the image and posted it on my Instagram page. A few days later I received a notification that I’d been tagged in a new post. When I looked, it was my image cropped a bit. In the description was an emoticon for a camera next to my handle. Sadly their post is getting more likes and traffic then my original post. However in my profile I have clearly posted “Contact me directly for permission to use”.
I went through the copyright infringement form and process on Instagram. After a confirmation email step, the violation was taken down almost immediately.
“Thanks for bringing this matter to our attention. We removed or disabled access to the content you reported for violating the Instagram Terms of Use. We understand this action to resolve your intellectual property issue.”
Instagram
A friend recommended using Pixsy to search for my images online. I used the trial version to search through 500 of my Instagram posts and got back 200 hits of my images appearing on other people’s web site. The vast majority of them are sites that just scrape instagram and re-post images. In all that noise were four images that are more traditional copyright theft.
The one that caught me off guard was a Canadian site with an embedded link to my post. Technically they did not steal my image but they are getting the benefit of my work. How should I feel?
This is not the first time I have found my work stolen. Back in the early 90’s I had written a few programs which I later found published on a CD of shareware. A few years ago I had a site grab a frame of my YouTube video and post it on their site using the Creative Commons derived with attribution rules.
When I first started posting images on Instagram, I was not really worried about image theft because posted pictures are such low resolution. In reality, people seem to not care about resolution or quality. If I am going to post my pictures online, then I cannot get too upset when they are stolen.