Known to be pretty legally strict, Janet Jackson's legal team appears to have gone after every person they can find who posted photos and videos from her "Unbreakable" tour to social media. As Page Six reports, Instagrammers from her recent concert stops in California have found their photos abruptly removed, and in some cases their entire accounts deleted due to claims of copyright infringement.
Jackson is notoriously ungenerous when it comes to even authorized concert photography, lately only allowing professional shots to be taken during the first thirty seconds of the first song in the show, and even the shots Getty Images has of her from recent weeks are slim and expensive. (Thus I'm forced to use the photo above, which is from 2011!)
People who posted shots from Jackson's recent shows in San Francisco and Los Angeles were greeted with messages from Instagram that said "a third party reported that the content violates their copyright." The photos were removed, and in the case of some concert-goers, they perhaps lost their entire accounts because of this, as one person tells Page Six. "Without warning. Every. Single. Photo. Gone," she said.
Posting concert videos I can sort of understand being a problem, even though everyone does this these days.
Some of these fans told TMZ they would be boycotting Instagram and Janet until this is resolved.
Instagram says that the deleted accounts are being restored, though. "We have identified a bug that resulted in the removal of accounts that shouldn’t have been removed,” said a rep for the app. "We have fixed the bug and are in the process of restoring the impacted accounts."