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Comment by jrandm | Hacker News Reader

You are explicitly allowing them to reshare your image via the platform -- whether that's an embedded view, iframe, img tag pointing to the original, or copy with attribution seems academic to me. The point is you allow them to send your content on to other people, right?

They weren't advertising with it, the article mentions they did ask for permission before doing that. As-is all I'm aware of Crocs doing is taking an image that was published and willingly tagged to their brand and putting it in a public collection of similar photos. If I posted a picture of myself on every bulletin board I could find posing with [popular_brand] and labeled it with a big, flashing sign that said '[brand] LOOK HERE', is it unreasonable for that brand to share my image on their website? I don't think so.

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> You are explicitly allowing them to reshare your image via the platform

I don't know if I fully concede that, but it's almost immaterial, because the company ripped it off the platform and rehosted it on their own site.

> the article mentions they did ask for permission before doing that

No. "Crocs pulled the photo and posted it to their website [...] It was only much later that Crocs sought explicit permission from Ms. Way, which she declined." From the NYT source article: "The company had not asked Ms. Way for permission, and she was not aware that Crocs had used the photo until a reporter contacted her on Instagram."

You're appealing to what is "reasonable" to expect or not expect someone to do with your content, but it doesn't really matter -- reproducing someone else's copyrightable work without their express permission is illegal, and hashtags aren't express enough. (In the US at least, and again I'm not a lawyer.)

Instagram's terms of use and privacy policy are less explicit about rights to redistribute your content (than Twitter), but there are several lines like "Once you have shared User Content or made it public, that User Content may be re-shared by others." Most of their policies are about absolving them of any responsibility of what happens with that re-sharing.

They initially used her (public, tagged) photo in a photo gallery on the site, and requested permission for standard commercial use (print ads, signage, paid placements, etc). Possibly the reporter's questioning led them to begin to comment-request permission for any photo they pull, but I can appreciate a media team drawing a distinction between the types of usage.

The hashtag is only relevant in that it's reasonable you are drawing interested parties to see your photo, and the nature of a publishing platform means it's practical to expect that photo to be reused. I don't believe anyone could successfully argue a hashtag by itself is explicit permission, but the combination of publication, tagging, and no effort to control usage would seem to be some kind of implicit permission. Practically, as the site policy stresses, once the image is public it's outside of your control. (and without explicit denial, this incident's usage seems implicitly allowed)

>You are explicitly allowing them to reshare your image via the platform -- whether that's an embedded view, iframe, img tag pointing to the original, or copy with attribution seems academic to me. The point is you allow them to send your content on to other people, right?

Via the platform means it's still my tweet, and I have total control over it, and they can't do anything else with it.

Doing other things is not academic in that case.

>They weren't advertising with it[...]putting it in a public collection

Putting it in a public collection for the purpose of..... advertising.

>If I posted a picture of myself on every bulletin board I could find posing with [popular_brand] and labeled it with a big, flashing sign that said '[brand] LOOK HERE', is it unreasonable for that brand to share my image on their website?

Definitely unreasonable. "Look" and "put on your website" are different things.

Roundaboutly everything a business does is advertising, I'd draw a line between commercial advertising (ie: paid ad placements, physical displays) and content only available by someone actively going to a photo gallery on the website.

"You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).

Tip: This license is you authorizing us to make your Tweets on the Twitter Services available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same."

That's pretty explicit, you don't have total control over it once you publish that photo, neither according to the policy nor in a practical sense.

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