You may need permission to embed someone's Instagram post or you could be sued

In a surprising development, Instagram clarified that it does not grant sublicense rights for its embed API.

If you're planning to embed a photographer's Instagram post, you'd better ask them for permission first. (Pexels)

Instagram lets you embed posts from any public account on the platform. This may however get difficult as you may need to get permission to embed someone's Instagram post. 

This new development was confirmed by Instagram itself following a lawsuit was filed by photographer Elliot McGucken against Newsweek for embedding his Instagram post.

Newsweek on not getting to license the photo taken by McGucken, decided to instead embed his Instagram post on their website. Newsweek cited Instagram's terms of service which gives the company a copyright license along with a sublicense for other users.

In a statement to Ars Technica, Instagram said, “While our terms allow us to grant a sub-license, we do not grant one for our embeds API. Our platform policies require third parties to have the necessary rights from applicable rights holders. This includes ensuring they have a license to share this content, if a license is required by law.”

What this means is that although Instagram's copyright license is not extended to its embeds API. This means that one may still be required to get a license to use the post. And if this is brought up by the Instagram user then they can file a copyright lawsuit.

A similar incident happened last month where photographer Stephanie Sinclair sued Mashable for embedding her Instagram post. But in this case, the court ruled in favour of Mashable saying that Sinclair had given Instagram the right to sublicense her post.

But things may now take a different turn for the Newsweek case. Since Instagram has clearly stated that it does not sublicense rights to its embed API. It also gives photographers or just anyone more control over their third-party usage of their photos on Instagram. At present, if one's account is public on Instagram anyone their posts are embeddable. This is restricted only to private Instagram accounts. The Facebook-owned company also told Ars Technica that it is working on giving users more control over embedding their posts.