Janet Jackson Is Rewarding Her Fans By Deleting Their Instagram Accounts

Janet Jackson is back in our lives. She’s touring, she released a new album, and, unfortunately, she’s making it incredibly difficult for people looking to take pictures at her shows. Professional photographers had already been complaining about the limitations and conditions they had to agree to in order to take pictures, but now regular people who take pictures at a Jackson concert and post those pictures on Instagram are reporting that, after doing so, their accounts are being deleted.

But let’s start with the professional photographers, as they were the first ones to lodge complaints.

Concert photographers working shows and dealing with unfriendly requirements set by the artists is nothing new. Nor are those same camera jockeys complaining about the restraints. Earlier this summer, a photographer’s blog post about Taylor Swift’s harsh requirements for photographers went viral and resulted in Swift abruptly changing her policy. The beef with Swift was a copyright one, and while copyrights are an issue with Jackson’s Unbreakable tour, another new issue is the time limit set on photographers. Photographers have only 30 seconds to take photographs during the show’s opening number. Once that window closes, so does a photographer’s shutter.

For Instagram users, timing isn’t an issue, but copyright most definitely is.

According to TMZ, Instagram users who attended a Jackson concert and subsequently posted a video of the show on Instagram were quick to discover that Instagram had deleted their account. That’s kind of understandable, as maybe Jackson doesn’t want people to get a glimpse of her shows without buying a ticket. But it’s not just those posting videos; people posting pictures of concerts on the Unbreakable tour suffered the same fate.

Instagram first removed the content, stating it did because “a third party reported that content infringes or otherwise violates their rights.” Users then received messages explaining that their account has been deleted “for not following our (Instagram’s) terms. You won’t be able to log into this account and no one else will be able to see it. We’re unable to restore accounts that are deleted for these types of violations.” It was later explained as a mistake, that only those who were “repeat infringers” would have their accounts permanently deleted. First-timers had their accounts restored, yet the content in question was not.

Cue social media outrage:

Taylor Swift ended up caving. Will Jackson? We’ll see.

UPDATE: Yup, Jackson caved. Kind of. She released a statement that says she respects intellectual property, but will have her team “change their approach” when it comes to finding violators of copyright policy.

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