
Hacking Instagram: release your photos under Creative Commons - philipn
http://i-am-cc.org/
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hnriot
How exactly is this hacking instagram? Isn't this just republishing instagram
photos?

I presume the facebook licensing allows third parties to republish content
uploaded to their servers.

I hate to sound cynical, but does the world really need more ways to share the
plethora of crappy photos that is instagram?

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philipn
It's a hack because Instagram doesn't give you an option to license under CC
in their interface, and it's doubtful they will, now that they're owned by FB.
CC licensing on Flickr has had a huge impact on the free culture movement, and
it'd be great to see something like that happen with Instagram, which is now
(I assume) orders of magnitude more popular.

The way the default licensing on Instagram works is: you hold copyright and
Instagram has a non-exclusive right to use them in some ways. It doesn't
permit usage outside of that. So if you wanted to use an image on your blog or
in a Wikipedia article you'd be out of luck (or maybe just get lucky and not
get in any trouble).

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yew-right
Nice work. A good idea. FB is looking to profit from UGC. UGC mean User
Generated Content in case you are not familiar all the acronyms. You send them
_your_ stuff and they use it to make money but restrict others from using it.
They do this with a silly license thanno one reads. So use the CC license
instead. If you are into "sharing", then CC is the better choice. If you want
to enrich FB, then I guess keep agreeing to FB's license.

Truly, they are _your_ photos, not FB's, and you can license them any way you
want. The CC license is there because people generally do not write up their
own licenses. How many people even truly understand copyright? Most lawyers I
know do not even fully understand it. Nothing is to say you can't draw up your
own license though. One of my favorites is the "Do Whatever the Fuck You Want
License". It is one line: Do whatever the fuck you want. Beautiful.

Another one I like is the "non-license". It's two words: Public domain.

This is the web. Everything gets copied. And licenses are just words. What
matters really is whether someone is going to sue you. A license can make that
easier or harder to do. But the truth is, if someone really wants to sue you,
if you are in the US, they can. License or no license. Whether the suit goes
forward is another matter. Still, getting sued is a hassle, even if the suit
is baseless. (A strategy is born. Eureka.)

Apologies for the profanity.

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jbuzbee
The "Hacking Instagram" headline caught my eye. Not exactly related, but I
also "Hacked Instagram" to add a whole bunch of new photo sharing options to
the official Android Instagram App. There's no official way to add plugins, so
I did it the hard way by having my app spawn Instagram and then monitor user-
interactions within the app. When I detect a photo is ready, I bring up my
sharing option menu so the user can send the photo via email, SMS, dropbox,
Google+ etc, etc. It's a hack for sure, but was interesting to write:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.houseblend...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.houseblend.instaecho)

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memnips
I'm a little slow today. Does this actually utilize an Instagram API to change
the license on their side? If so I'm curious as to what the API call is as I
believe it's undocumented.

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francov88
Great work, incredible idea and very functional MVP. Perhaps you can consider
integrating IFTTT to make it even easier to share?

You need a marketing campaign around the concept.

Good luck!

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yock
Cool, I signed up. One thing to consider though would be to allow at some
point different licenses for different images. I just inadvertently licensed
some pictures of my daughter as attrib-share-alike. Admittedly my mistake, but
it would be nice to have a way to have quickly corrected this since there
seems to be no way to exclude any images.

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philipn
Yeah, very good point. I'll add that in next. I just went with a simple date
range because I wasn't sure how many API calls were really allowed -- it isn't
clear if it's 5000 per-client per-day, or 5000 per-token per-day.

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dwynings
This is awesome Philip. I'd love the ability to tag my photos as right now
they aren't easily searchable for people.

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philipn
Yeah, I'm saving tags and all the other metadata like location in the DB. It's
exposed via the API right now. It'll get added in to the UI sometime next
week, hopefully.

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tommoor
Seems like a great idea with a noble cause. I wonder if you will struggle to
get people to signup though - perhaps you could appeal to people's vanity more
and tell them they'll get more followers by signing up to CC. ;-)

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sp332
Or (perhaps more realistically :) point out that you're more likely to have
other people use your photos if you publish them with a license instead of
making people contact you about rights.

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playhard
Signed up and released my old photos too!

<http://i-am-cc.org/instagram/ramakanth_d>

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JackHerrick
Fantastic work!

Wish Instagram had offered this option from their launch. Imagine how many
great photos we would now have in the commons .

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irunbackwards
Which CC license is being adopted?

<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/>

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cmwelsh
You can pick the licensing terms you prefer. Did you even look at the
submitted URL? Each picture on the site shows its licensing terms underneath
using icons.

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irunbackwards
Yeah, totally spaced on the badges. Thanks for pointing them out :)

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awwstn2
Great work, Philip.

