from Instagram that counts is the contractual language in its terms of use. So what does that document actually mean? Well, that’s the problem. The outraged users don’t really know. Instagram management doesn’t really know. Only the lawyers know for sure. Right, the lawyers. Here’s the thing about lawyers: they don’t write to communicate. Lawyers are like programmers, their code doesn’t have to be human-readable. It may even be deliberately obfuscated. It just has to run on the target system and produce the desired outcome. In the case of terms-of-use language, the target system is the courts, and the desired outcome is income. Instagram has spent a lot of money creating a place for you to display your pictures—which presumably have some value or you wouldn’t bother to post them. And just as a bank instinctively acts to extract all the value it can from your money as it passes through its corporate fingers, Instagram wants to squeeze what value it can out of your pictures while they’re taking up space on its servers. It can’t help itself. It’s a social media corporation, it was made that way. Unfortunately, Instagram didn’t sufficiently obfuscate its lust. This hurt the company in the short term, but there are signs [U6] that all has been forgiven and the Amazing Instagram is bouncing back as the Superior Instagram. Because the only thing shorter than an outraged user’s fuse is an outraged user’s attention span. About the Author John Shade was born under a cloud in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1962. Subsequent internment in a series of obscure institutions of ostensibly higher learning did nothing to brighten his outlook. He says he doesn’t post his pictures online because he doesn’t photograph well. Follow John on Twitter [U7], send him your feedback [U8], or discuss the article in the magazine forum [U9]. PragPub January 2013 39