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Comment by harryleeming | Hacker News Reader

Hi HN!

If anyone hasn't read Max Dubler's 2017 PetaPixel blog post 'No, You Can’t Use My Photos On Your Brand’s Instagram For Free'. I'd highly recommend it.

https://petapixel.com/2017/07/13/no-cant-use-photos-brands-i...

There is a huge amount of copyright infringement that goes on on Instagram, but to be fair to users there isn't really any decent framework in place to make sure they're reposting legally.

I built Sharefair over the last few months, it currently is only accessible if you have a creator account (currently limited by Instagram's new API). But I'm hoping to include all account types in the next few months.

Let me know what you guys think!

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I love that you are helping creators to defend the value of their work! have you considered investigating partnering with legal startups such as legalzoom, legalist, or someone else to help time strapped creators send the nastygrams as well?

We haven't considered that properly, I think chasing up copyright infringement is a difficult one, especially for Instagram reposts where the payout will most likely be so low.

Having said that, in the US, the CASE act, which will introduce a small claims court for exactly this kind of use case (excuse the pun) made it through the House of Representatives yesterday. So it's an interesting option for sure!

https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/22/20927545/copyright-bill-...

When I visit your site on mobile, 1/3 of the screen tells me your name (not your company's name - your name) and zero percent of the page gives me any details beyond "The easy way to get instant permission from photographers to share their images on your Instagram legally."

Unless you personally matter to every potential customer I'd reverse those two percentages.

try the homepage sharefair.co/ :)

I thought it would be more interesting to link to an actual licensing page for an Instagram profile, than the homepage.

But I appreciate the feedback, definitely could make some improvements on the mobile side of things!

Is there anything unique about your site that prevents Instagram from just implementing licensing themselves?

Nope, not at all. It would be great if they did though, it would actually give them an incentive to protect artists and photographers. Right now they are taking a real back seat with copyright infringement, which is a real shame because it's the creators that bring all the value to the platform and they're the ones that are losing out, whether it's not being properly attributed for their work or brands reposting their stuff without payment.

Makes sense, thanks for taking a crack at fixing this problem!

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