"These kinds of terms are pretty common these days, which is unfortunate, because some of them border on the ridiculous," says Woodrow Hartzog, an assistant professor at Samford University law school who writes frequently about law and the internet. Hartzog says that Instagram needs some level of copyright control user images because "many copies of user content are created via ordinary operation of the website." But he adds, "I think it is fair to question the scope of many of these terms as potentially outside of the realm of what is required to operate. It's no secret that users rarely read and understand these terms, so companies have little incentive to draft user-friendly agreements."
- Date Published:12/17/2012
- Original Publication:Gawker