So, Kevin Systrom hasn't taken my advice (yet) on creating a new interface on Instagram to enable us all to buy and sell our photos to each other and to companies interested in paying for them -- and have Instagram take a cut of the proceeds and/or sell microcurrencies for micropayments. You know, like Second Life!
Instead, he's rolling out a TOS with the big grab that Facebook used to make of our content -- until there was a huge revolt and they changed the TOS, remember?
Linden Lab, makers of Second Life also makes you sign a TOS that grabs your content for perpetually paid-up forever -- to use in their ads without compensation. But you still retain the intellectual property to your content and can buy and sell it. And the reason Linden Lab has been profitable, along with its users in the content, design, scripting and server rental businesses, is that it doesn't rely only on you giving up all rights to your content to make a buck occasionally with other companies, it engineers digital rights management into the user-generated content and takes a cut on the web marketplace and the currency sales and of course on the cash-out.
Instagram could be doing all this as I explained, with my amended dashboard that Anil Dash couldn't see his way clear to making, either.
But here's what's even more awful than Instagram, which at the end of the day, is just putting in the standard boilerplate suggested by California lawyers to social media platforms since time immemorial.
The supine and craven tech press is cheer-leading this big grab instead of criticizing it. At least Anil Dash made a techocommunist criticism of the big grab, hoping to enable "Creative Communism" to flourish to take care of the rights issue and keep it out of the big, rich mean capitalist company's hands. But of course, that's awful -- why can't we have Creative Commerce and get paid!
Gizmodo not only takes Instagram's side, author Sam Biddle bullies and whips their readers as whiny pussies if they complain about the big grab of their content and data -- awful, awful, awful.
Sam Biddle, what's wrong with you??? Why can't you let customers own their IP and sell it?!
Joe Brown at Gizmodo is no better -- he tells Instagram to go ahead and take his photos for free to sell to big corporations -- and suggests some they could take. What a wuss.
Cord Jefferson is no better -- he unquestioningly reports the TOS grab without asking why, indeed, we can't have pay buttons. To be sure, he admits that it isn't as bad as portrayed as there is still language about owning your own IP, but there's no curiosity, to breadth of vision about how it could be profitable for user and company.
I'm starting to feel as if user-generated commerce on the web is like some strange discredited theory like vaccinations cause autism or vitamins can cure it. How did this happen?
Recent Comments