Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Well...yes...this headline manages to be both true but a little off-point. By posting your photos on Instagram, you have definitely given a third-party (Instagram) the right to make copies and distribute your photos...yet, the photo still belongs to you, Instagram is quick to point out [1].

But the reselling of photos as described here is not particular to Instagram. It involves an artist who reappropriates them for artistic purposes (similar to parody)...he could've done this with any photo or off of any service...so this concept isn't even particular to the Internet and the digital age.

However, such examples as the OP are always good for discussion about "what is art?"...it's not so much the actual work (measured in sweat and hours) put into it, but the skill in repurposing it, and in the reputation of the artist...you have to build up quite the career of actually interesting work before you can get to the point where a rich tycoon will pay you $250K to splatter mud patterns on one of his walls. It'd be interesting to see a lawsuit come out of this...I'm guessing the artist could make a good case that the original photographers would never be able to raise $90K for their images...people only pay for it because it is work that he noticed/curated/altered.

[1] http://blog.instagram.com/post/38252135408/thank-you-and-wer...

To me, it's almost the same (but not quite exactly) as someone posting code on stack overflow, and developers using and relying on that code for their job.

The idea of what part of information is owned and what is shared is a concept that fascinates and bewilders me consistently. Art has all these emotional attachments to it, this personal affect, and not many stop to think that for some people, code - even mathematics, is exactly the same.

Why is there a difference between someone who posts a solution on the internet, versus someone who teaches a course and publishes a book, versus someone who traces a drawing using a projector for art? Public and cultural education, myth, and superstition, mostly. But in quantity and quality - these determine the success or failure of any venture business; even the start of a lifelong friendship.

How do people come to the thoughts they conclude with? How do people get ideas? I guarantee you, if you lock yourself up in a little room and wall yourself off from society, you will either arrive at some derivative of absolute truth or you will go insane, possibly both.

If I post this comment, and then other people have ideas that are profitable as a result of my comment, does it matter how similar their idea to my comment appears? Do I own those ideas that result from my comment? I would say no, because that's absurd, but yet, we live in a world that has opinions that cover the entire spectrum of this dialogue, and then some.

Nah, there's a pretty big difference (mentally) between SO and Instagram.

You put your code on SO with the intention of giving it to someone else, potentially many others. That's the entire point in SO and it's pretty clear from the start that that's what you're doing there.

You put your photos on Instagram so you can show them to your friends. Instagram is a storage space for your photos. When someone looks at your photo, the intention is that you're showing them the photo, rather than giving them the photo. (Un)Fortunately, when computers are concerned, showing and giving are the same thing.

The fact that people think of showing and giving as different, but their smart devices treat them the same, results in a lot of friction. The entire DRM industry and respective legislation is concerned with aligning computer behaviour with (some) human expectations.

So yes, I agree that Instagram works the same as Stack Overflow, but that's not what people's instinctive expectation is.

While this may be instinctive to you, it is not necessarily instinctive to an artist, or someone with no socio-normal intuition.

Based on stack overflow's terms of use and instagram's they are not the same. Stack overflow's terms say you give stack overflow and others the right to copy and use the content. Instagram's terms say you only give permission to Instagram. And well this makes sense as the purpose of these sites differ. If you want to share photos that people can use elsewhere go to a site like flicker were you can easily attach a Creative Commons license.

> It involves an artist who reappropriates them for artistic purposes (similar to parody)...he could've done this with any photo or off of any service...so this concept isn't even particular to the Internet and the digital age.

So why is this legal in the case of photographs, yet sampling (in music) remains illegal?

The legal crux seems to rely on if a significant amount of the original work has changed or been put into different context that sets it apart from the original work.

Examples being Vanilla Ice vs Bowie & Queen, and Girltalk/Illegal Art [1]

[1] http://illegal-art.net/girltalk

Actually this is nothing like paradoy. And I suspect with a better lawyer he would lose hide "transformative" case.

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