"Sinclair v. Ziff Davis” by Paul Weinrauch

Question: What are the ramification of the court case?

  • With the court case, "Sinclair v. Ziff Davis”, the judge said it was ok to embed instagram post into websites. “The court held that a third party user may embed an artist’s Instagram post in published articles and other types of content *without the artist’s permission” - ASMP National

  • Here is the letter sent to the CEO of Instagram and Facebook from ASMP: https://www.asmp.org/wp-content/uploads/200416_IG-Embedding-Association_Final.pdf

  • An example from my website on what it looks like to embed a feed: https://www.weinrauchphoto.com/instagram

  • What it looks like when you embed a post from instagram on a website: https://www.weinrauchphoto.com/p/test (I used ASMPs national account)

  • Embedding a single post is possible when you are public (see attached screenshot with ASMP national), when it is private people cannot embed (screenshot of me with family)

My thoughts:

1: Make private (which means it needs to be a personal account, you can always switch back to a business account at anytime, but the problem is, it doesn't allow for marketing to new people, for example, use of hashtags.

2: Post images and then after a period of time take them down, so that it breaks the link.

3: Don't worry about it until it happens, and then remove the post. (What are the chances someone is going to link to it? and how are you going to know when it happens?)

4: Do you care? Embedding still allows people to see the original source and where it was created. My problem with this is, companies could make the choice not to pay for art, if they can just embed it….. 

None of these are a great solution. We can hope that these organizations, such as ASMP and artists can put enough heat on Instagram, that they change their policy.  

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