Judge dismisses lawsuit over Instagram terms of service

(Credit: Instagram)

A federal judge has dismissed a class-action lawsuit against Instagram over controversial terms-of-service changes announced last year that many feared awarded ownership of users' photos to the popular photo-sharing service.

In a decision issued Friday, Judge William Alsup for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that Lucy Rodriguez could not sue Instagram for a number of procedural reasons, including the level of plaintiff's injury and state of residence. Alsup also denied plaintiff's request for leave to file a second amended complaint.

A Facebook representative declined to comment on the ruling.

The lawsuit, which was filed last December, accused the service of breach of contract and trying to "grab for customer property rights" after announcing revisions to its terms of service that many feared gave the service perpetual rights to sell users' photographs without payment or notification. After a user backlash, Instagram soon backpedaled on the changes and announced that the terms would revert to the version in place since the service launched in 2010.

Instagram had said that the new terms of service would go into effect January 19 and that users could not opt out but could delete their accounts before the deadline. The lawsuit took issue with that last point, claiming that customers could cancel but that in doing so would forfeit the right to their photos.

In a motion for dismissal in February, Instagram argued that Lucy Funes -- the original plaintiff in the case -- was not entitled to her claim because she could have deleted her account before the new terms were implemented and continued to use her account on January 19, when the changes in terms of service occurred. Lucy Rodriguez was substituted as the plaintiff in an amended filing in March.

Photos Increase Facebook Reach, But Does It Drive Traffic?

Photos are said to improve engagement on Facebook, but does that engagement in turn boost traffic or fans? No, our testing found — but there still might be value in using them.
Ever since Facebook started displaying Reach data directly on Facebook fan pages, here at Marketing Land and Search Engine Land we have been diligently watching the fluctuations happen day-to-day.  Knowing that using photos is a sure way to attract a more engaged audience, we started to deliberately manually post more photos on Facebook, and not via our third-party tool. We spent about a week posting photos with links in the caption where it made sense – after all, we’re publishers, and our goal is to drive traffic to our sites.

Photo Posts vs. Link Posts Performance

When we compared photo posts to link posts in a 30-day period in PageLever, one of the many tools we use, we realized immediate results:

• 4x engaged users per post
• 4x the amount of shares
• 4x more consumption
• 4x as many shares
• Twice as many likes
• 2.5x more virality

Great news, right? Concrete actions with concrete results. Lots of visibility, lots of engagement. With more visibility, you can make the assumption that site traffic and followers would see the benefit.

No Big Increase In Fan Growth

From the chart below you can see a bit of a peak in growth the week of July 9, which is when we started posting photos with links. But the Removed Fans metric also increased at that time, so it’s safe to say that there really hasn’t been any impact on Fan growth.

How Was The Traffic?

As you can see below, despite the social success, there was not much to write home about.

Marketing Land Facebook Campaign Traffic

Search Engine Land Facebook Campaign Traffic

Since there didn’t seem to be a blip anywhere on either site, I looked at the top five photo posts and the top five link posts with most reach. I did the same with Search Engine Land. Then I grabbed the top ten Facebook posts from each site that drove the most traffic. What I discovered was this:

• For Marketing Land, six out of the ten top traffic-driving posts were links, not photos.
• For Search Engine Land, seven out of the ten top traffic-driving posts were links, not photos.

But does this mean the efforts were unsuccessful? Brands and businesses everywhere have struggled defining the value of content broadcasted across the social space. Just a few months ago I wrote a post asking the same questions, only using Pinterest as an example. On Facebook we know people are seeing our content, the Insight metrics show that. So I repeat the question, is there a value if it’s not driving traffic or audience?
Absolutely. Content consumption happens everywhere, and publishers need to be ready to have their content read and distributed outside of the confines of their site. And the broader audience, the better. Does it really matter whether your brand engages with you on your turf, or on a site they spend time on? And as you already likely know, the SEO benefits of social activity is there, and in light of all of the link building confusion happening these days, building a reliable, honest social presence will likely benefit long-term.