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Let me clarify on a bit of an abstract question.

I'm about to develop an app, through which users can capture and store images. Commercially, the main cost here that springs to mind is storage cost.

There are platforms (e.g. facebook, dropbox, instagram) that may expose an API to allow consumers to upload images.

Which laws/licensing regulations are in place to prevent me from using these platforms (or platforms like it) for storage to avoid costs?

A few key points to make:

  • My storage is in Azure, I'm wondering this purely theoretically. I don't plan on ever taking this approach, for a few reasons. It's just something I've always wondered.
  • It may seem like the feasibility of this approach (or lack of) could render the whole hypothetical useless. But supposing a built in redundancy/fallback (i.e. used multiple platforms in the event of my data being snagged), it's feasible.
DanDev
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3 Answers3

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This isn't something where there will be a law that says "you can't use facebook for hosting", that will be left up to the contract between facebook and you, i.e. their terms of use.

You might well find that for a small volume of images that you currently want to store, you can do exactly this. It would be prudent to look carefully at the terms, and have contingencies for what happens if you near or reach any limits that may be present.

The other likely scenario is the terms will include language along the lines of "We reserve the right to block access to users for reasons", i.e. if they find your use problematic, they can cut you off with no warning.

Caleth
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It's an interesting idea, not for the commercials but for potential anonymous distributed storage.

The problem of course is you would run afoul of the Terms and Conditions of any site you used and presumably have your accounts periodically banned and data deleted.

To deal with that you would have to automate account creation and data upload, this would require than you bypassed captcha and other bot protection on those sites.

Its not impossible, but you would be fighting a war against the various sites you used and would have to constantly update your application in response to their changes. Given that things like bit torrent exist I don't think its will be a viable option for most applications.

Greg Burghardt
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Ewan
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If you intend to allow your users to store the images in their own Facebook/Instagram/Dropbox/etc. accounts, then there is no legal hindrance to develop such a system.

On the other hand, if you intend to use your own account as backing storage, copyright law is one thing to consider from a legal viewpoint, especially in combination with the type of content that the provider allows a user to upload (only what they created themselves, or also third party works) and what rights you give the provider when uploading something. Just because someone created an image in/with your app does not mean you have anything to say, in a legal sense, about what may happen next to that image.

Bart van Ingen Schenau
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