Now can we start refusing to be cattle instead of customers?

Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos – CNET News:

Under the new policy, Facebook claims the perpetual right to license all public Instagram photos to companies or any other organization, including for advertising purposes, which would effectively transform the Web site into the world’s largest stock photo agency. One irked Twitter user quipped that “Instagram is now the new iStockPhoto, except they won’t have to pay you anything to use your images.”

These services are “free” the same way the supermarket is free for the bar of soap. You’re the product. Of course it’s “free.” The real tell showing your place in the scheme of things is that nobody is offering you a cut of the (huge) profits. If you were an actual human being, you’d have a right to part of them for your contribution.

But you have no rights. It’s all subsumed under property rights. Whoever is making money has the right to trample your privacy, copyrights, free speech, and whatever else suits their bottom line.

You know what? That doesn’t work and can’t work because it ends in total absurdity. Some rights have to take precedence over others or they all become useless. Human rights have to come before property rights. If they don’t, I could kidnap people for a slave farm and there’d be nothing they could do about it because they’re my property, which is more important than anything else. And anybody else could do the same to me. There would be neither human rights nor property rights for anybody. Everything would be lost. If human rights come first, property rights are secure within their proper limited sphere.

Religion is another example. Freedom of religion must be secondary to freedom of speech, movement, and basic human rights like self defense. If it isn’t, then my religion could be to kill your religion. There would be neither human rights nor freedom of religion for anybody.

As I said, getting rights in the wrong order ends in absurdity. It ends in no rights, not even the one usurping the top spot.

If we had a real government, instead of our captured kleptocracy, our rights to our own work would be clear in law, and we wouldn’t have to worry about losing control to some piker holding us up at a chokepoint.

Instagram expropriating people’s cat pictures seems like a picayune thing to get worked up about. But it’s yet one more symptom of an inversion in the correct order of rights. They have no right to do that because money cannot cancel basic rights to your own work. There’s no law against corporations making money, certainly. That’s what they’re there for. But not at the price of trampling more important rights. And that’s not a small thing at all.