Instagram and that free lunch

There has been a lot of talk today about the decision of Facebook who own InstaGram to declare possible IP rights to any photos or images that you upload with the Instagram tool.

Now we still do not know for sure if this is an swoop to make Instagram the worlds largest stock photo supplier by default or just an over enthusiastic lawyer covering all the bases.

But lets say Facebook do want the IP on all those photos, they host them and you do not pay to host them with them. so what is the problem?

What I hear you say, they cannot sell my photos!  I took those!  They are my IP.

Well hang on, I bet a lot of people who host their photos or art work online do so using services like Instangram, Facebook, Flickr, etc.  If you then use these services as an online portfolio then you will likely benefit from this either financially or socially.  What recompense do the providers get from this?

Because these services are amazing and cost money, not your money, someone elses money.  So we place little value on them in real terms, we just complain when the people who provide these services try to recoup some of their investment and try to make them a profitable enterprise.

If we want a world where we can share without this fear of our IP being owned then we should all follow the philosophy of WikiPedia and contribute to a free and open platform for all the world.

I think Twitter is awesome, but someone is paying for this and one day they will get fed up paying for it because I cannot see how we can make Twitter pay.  If we do you will all leave anyway bleating on about adverts and how it ruined Twitter.

Well think about it, a free lunch has never existed and we all pay in one way or another.  If you want that ideological Utopian world online then remember who provides what you class as that now and look to who really is trying to make it happen.

Rant over.