Insta360 Cleans Up Ambiguous User Service Agreement In Response to User Concern

Shortly following people rightly taking notice of Insta360’s user service agreement and expressing concern and displeasure, the company has adjusted its language.

Insta360’s revised user service agreement, officially version 6.0, was published today and removes two significant portions of subsection 7.2, part of the larger “Intellectual Property Rights Statement” section of the agreement.

The prior version, published in July, said the following, edited for length:

7.2 … Unless proven to the contrary, you have the right and agree to grant us, worldwide, non-exclusive, free of charge, the right to: (1) store, use, post, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works based on, transmit, perform, and display the Content. (2) incorporate the Content, in whole or in part, into any other work, media, or technology of any kind. (3) commercially exploit your uploaded, posted content… (5) sub-license to other third parties for use in the manner described above.

The complete text is available in a screenshot below, but the portion of the user service agreement that attracted the most frustration among users relates to “(3) commercially exploit your uploaded, posted content.”

One possible reading of this, ignoring that the Insta360 app is a commercial product that Insta360 uses to generate revenue via in-app purchases, is that the company was claiming rights to make direct money using content that photographers and videographers uploaded to Insta360’s various community platforms. This is an interpretation Insta360 pushed back on.

Insta360 told PetaPixel earlier this week that, in the event a user uploaded content, which is an implicit acceptance of the user service agreement, the company was granted “only a limited license to use this content for specific purposes, such as formatting for display and distribution within the Insta360 Community forum and community functions of Insta360 software.”

However, understandably, people expected more clarity from the company, especially regarding “commercially exploit,” as it is aggressive-sounding language.

The relevant section, 7.2, is now significantly shorter. No longer does Insta360 claim any rights to “commercially exploit” user content, nor does the company make any reference to connection technology, which was an odd but not especially troubling inclusion in the user service agreement.

Three other changes are minor at face value but actually quite significant.

Perhaps the biggest is that Insta360 has added the term “limited” to describe the rights that users provide to the company when they post, upload, or otherwise utilize the company’s platform and services. While Insta360 itself described the rights it assumed as “limited,” that was not included in the user service agreement itself.

Where the prior version said, “sub-license to other third parties for use in the manner described above” in its own sentence, the reference to sublicensing has now been moved into another sentence. The broader permissions provided by the user when they upload or submit content to Insta360’s platform services are now, in and of themselves, “sub-licensable.”

“Sublicensable” is a typical term in user service agreements as it relates to user uploaded content. Instagram claims sublicensable rights to anything uploaded to its platform, so does Adobe, and Sony, to name just a few companies. This matters because companies routinely utilize third parties to provide services to users, whether a company that wrote code for an app, a storage provider, or a cloud service company.

The other notable change here is that Insta360 claims the right to “incorporate the Content, in whole or in part, into any other work, media, or technology of any kind for tutorial, promotional purpose.”

This type of use was already covered in the prior agreement by virtue of it saying “(1) store, use, post, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works based on, transmit, perform and display the Content. (2) incorporate the Content, in whole or in part, into any other work, media, or technology of any kind,” but now a particular use case is explicitly spelled out.

If terms of service and user service agreements read like rights grabs, that’s because they are. Social media companies, image-sharing platforms, and basically any service that transmits content of any kind require rights to user-uploaded and posted content to function at all.

However, that does not mean a company like Adobe, Insta360, Sony, Instagram, and so on, is tenting its fingers like a cartoon villain waiting for the chance to take all the content people have uploaded to its platform and start selling everything to the highest bidder.

But it’s wise to be vigilant. Especially in the age of AI — and AI needs material for training — people are rightly more concerned than ever about precisely what rights they’re handing over to a company when they use their service. Will a company sell user content to an AI company? They could. All companies must react and respond to people’s changing concerns, and there is significant room for improvement across the board. Users should express these concerns directly to companies whose software they use, and responsible companies will react accordingly.

That said, companies, like everyone else, live in a legal world that was built long before the internet was a glint in computer scientists’ eyes. In many ways, the legal framework feels inadequate to deal with modern technology and the resulting concerns. In light of that, companies must ensure their users understand they are agreeing to, and do their best not to violate people’s trust. Some companies perform better than others in this regard.

For users, their responsibilities are twofold. If they want to utilize any of the modern services that people at this point take for granted, they must understand what they agree to because not every company does the legwork to make service agreements straightforward or address concerns when they come up. Whether ambiguities are by design or consequences of a wonky legal landscape is up to individuals to determine for themselves. Further, people must accept that if they do not want to hand over any rights to their content, their software choices will be extremely limited, and sharing or posting content online will be impossible.