It’s part of a longer, ongoing investigation into the use of photography

This is the final week to visit madskills: Self Documenting Construction on Social Media in our Octagonal gallery. Photograph by Matthieu Brouillard © CCA

Parallel Construction

Stéphane Aleixandre considers the murkiness of copyright on social media and its impact on construction images

This article reflects on how digital media poses new and quickly shifting challenges to collecting and research institutes, especially regarding copyright, licensing, usage, and reproducibility. It emerges from research on social media videos taken by construction workers and featured in madskills: Self-Documenting Construction on Social Media, curated by Hester Keijser and on view in our Octagonal Gallery from 7 June–20 October 2024.

In becoming creators and distributors of images of construction sites, workers and craftsmen translate the foundations of the built environment onto a digital architecture whose plans are ambivalent. Their images constitute an undervalued and misunderstood type of intellectual property; its exploitation is an essential mechanism for ordering the circulation of digital media on social networks. Through producing and disseminating innumerable photographs and videos of their work, construction workers have become, voluntarily or not, builders of a public image of the construction site–and simultaneously copyright managers. The copyright license—a practical legal tool, but not always one that is easy to master or understand—lies at the heart of the many decisions taken by these creators and social networks to guide the circulation of images and shape the public’s perception of the construction world. Although bound by the terms of this license, creators and owners of social networks have different motivations. Yet, what’s at stake for construction and business is the same: the image.

For researchers, archives, and museums, using and collecting these new digital and ephemeral documents—which extend traditional ways of representing the built environment—remain pressing challenges, in large part because of the lack of transparency surrounding their copyright.

“I started about a year and a half ago. By now, I’ve probably uploaded around a hundred videos. Well, I wanted to show people a bit about the detailed work that a forestry worker does. People often think you’re destroying the planet, but in my videos, I try to show that it’s not about destruction; it’s about helping the forest thrive and explaining why we do what we do. That’s why I started doing it, to educate people about the forestry sector. Well, you know, the topic of photography, videos, and all that has interested me my whole life, ever since I was very young. But I really got into it nowadays with the good video cameras available. I started taking video editing courses and such, and I began making videos about my world. That’s how things developed.” Diego Mediavilla quoted in an interview wiht the CCA, 2023.

Diego Mediavilla (@timberteamhdpm), Still from a video of tree trunk cutting, Spain, 5 January 2023. Source: TikTok © Diego Mediavilla

These videos are works protected by copyright laws (the Copyright Act in Canada), like any other original creation resulting from a minimum output and judgment.1 In this respect, construction worker-creators are equally treated as photographers or artists; the *Copyright Act( makes no distinction between these roles.2 The author is deemed as the individual who chooses the subject, place, and time of an authored output; who produces and films; or who asks someone to film on their behalf. Whatever their motivation, charged fee, or level of anonymity, the author retains copyright over their creations. In many countries, such as Canada, if an authored production is carried out by workers as part of or during their employment, the employer instead holds its copyright.

Choosing Instagram or TikTok to broadcast their views on construction offers undeniable advantages. The worker-creators have initial control over the distribution of their media since social networks exercise no editorial oversight if copyright and Community Guidelines are respected, and their content is hosted free of charge, allowing them to communicate their ideas widely and build their network.3 Indeed, the most attractive advantage of social media is the possibility of one’s creations being seen by a very large number of people. Sharing or aggregating other people’s videos to one’s account—and therefore using their copyright via the license given by the creators to Instagram—amplifies the phenomenon.

As a result, many construction workers are now working on parallel digital worksites on their phones or computers, on which they have found a new vocation as creators, image aggregators, influencers, or sellers. In turn, Instagram and TikTok monetize information about workers’ activity and interests on the platform, showing publicity from advertisers who are interested in the audience the workers have found and developed.


  1. Madeleine Lamothe-Samson, « Les conditions d’existence du droit d’auteur : n’oublions pas l’auteur et sa créativité », Les Cahiers de propriété intellectuelle 15, no. 2 (2002): 642.  

  2. Copyright Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-42, art. 3.5.1. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-42/FullText.html

  3. Copyright”; “Community Guidelines“ 

“Our data centres help us accommodate the growing number of photos and videos that people share on our family of apps and services, and also help us scale as we create more immersive experiences through live video, 360 photos and videos, and VR/AR. Once completed, the full Los Lunas campus will have six buildings with a total of 2.8 million square feet, and it will be home to hundreds of thousands of servers in 22 data halls like this one.” “Take a tour of our data center in Eagle Mountain, Utah,” Tech at Meta, 20 August 2021. https://tech.facebook.com/engineering/2021/8/eagle-mountain-data-center/

Photograph of Meta data centre, 2019. © Meta

Yet, when watching videos of construction workers on Instagram or TikTok, the absence, concealment, or removal of standard copyright attributes is glaringly obvious. The author’s name is very often replaced by a handle (the prerogative of anonymity that the Copyright Act grants to an author widely applies here), the videos generally have no title, their creation date is rarely specified, and one seldom finds a copyright notice or the © symbol, making it difficult to identify the author of the videos. And the more the video is shared or aggregated with other accounts, the more the thread linking the product to its creator. The very notion of copyright may seem superfluous to users, given the ease of sharing, resharing, collecting, copying, modifying, deleting, and forgetting videos that rarely exceed 90 elements. It is almost as though copyright elements are eliminated on social media platforms because they might be considered unnecessary distractions from the immersive experience of consuming media—a reality check that slows down the speedy publication of a video before a flood of subsequent videos engulfs it into an algorithm or discovery page.

It may seem hard to imagine that each of the millions of videos posted on Instagram is protected by copyright laws. Indeed, collective mass networking suggests that anyone can use or rearrange the videos of other creators into their messages with no particular status or value. The sheer quantity of works that form part of a homogenizing experience of browsing social media tends to erase the notion of work and originality, yet originality remains and rights subsist. In a way, Instagram collapses the differences between publication and free use, between free and public domain; downloading videos is forbidden, as is using them outside the platform, and users technically cannot upload videos by other authors without their authorization.

The website “Terms of Service; Didn’t Read” (ToS;DR) was created in June 2012 to help clarify the terms of service, privacy terms, and usage conditions of many popular websites and social media platforms, like Instagram. Terms of Service, Didn’t Read, https://tosdr.org/. © Terms of Service; Didn’t Read CC BY-SA 3.0

Workers do not speak in many videos of construction sites, preferring to feature the sound of work, tools, and sometimes unusual materials, which makes the videos accessible by overcoming any language barrier. They often emphasize their practical and manual skills while avoiding any reference to their employer, construction firm, unions or professional milieu. They respect their employer’s and customer’s right to leave out any clues that might identify them. Perhaps they are also trying to avoid revealing to their current or potential employers that they are filming their worksite without their knowledge (which they are likely contractually forbidden), or they are choosing to respect professional conduct norms, such as never disclosing information about clients or files on social media without their consent.1 Despite the perceived freedom available to construction workers to develop visual content about their workplace, the balance and hierarchy of power between companies and employees seems to be maintained in the digital environment.

The scale and nature of social networking mean that construction worker-creators have become influenced by the image of the construction they have helped to shape through their posts: the widespread use of phone cameras and integrated editing tools and short format clips ultimately favour resemblance over specificity, which tends to shape a similar type of production highlighting the self-employed entrepreneur and their competency rendered in an aesthetically similar way (high-definition, moving camera, speed-ups and slow-downs, synchronization with popular music, the absence of zooming, blurring, fading, complex editing). And as with other sharing platforms, it’s not always easy to distinguish between the professional videographer, who lives off his or her royalties, and the amateur, whose main source of income is not generated through copyright. Qualitative features, such as likes and comments, can be quantified to inspire and drive subsequent content choices destined to capture attention.


  1. « Le Barreau se positionne quant à l’utilisation des réseaux sociaux », Droit-Inc, 4 April 2024. https://www.droit-inc.com/article/44505/le-barreau-se-positionne-quant-a-lutilisation-des-reseaux-sociaux.  

According to Instagrammer and heavy equipment operator Ceejay Turner, “I have also found that once you switch a page to a business, then they (Instagram) kind of like, they want you to pay for the ads, they want you to pay to do everything, so then all of a sudden you’re limited on your views because you’re not paying them.” The construction worker can be likened to an advertiser, so for Instagram, he changes category of actor and becomes a paying agent. But only Instagram knows when and how this category change takes place. Turner quoted in an interview with the CCA, 2023.

Ceejay Turner (@dirt.turner), Still from It’s basically an @engcon_canada, Canada, 11 October 2023. Source: Instagram © Ceejay Turner

The digital spaces created by social media are tools whose instruction manual–the Terms and Conditions–nevertheless reveal uneven copyright management. Instagram is a legally controlled environment. To register, you must agree to respect copyright and grant a “non-exclusive, free, transferable, sub-licensable and worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, perform, copy, publicly broadcast or display, translate and create derivative works from your content.”1 This non-negotiable copyright license will apply to all future uploads. Users grant many rights to Internet platforms—as many as a film producer can grant to a distributor, a creator can grant to a video game studio, and more than a writer grants to a book publisher. The major difference is that the platform does not remunerate the creator or pay royalties. Freedom of use is, in this case, a two-way street: you pay nothing to use our services, and we pay nothing to use your copyright and data. A thirty-second video isn’t a feature film or a video game, but in terms of views and commercial potential, its audience engagement may not be as distinct. Advertisers fund these platforms by selling the digital space generated by social media images and videos, in turn generating even more revenue by exploiting hidden rights over use and authorship.2

Flow, speed, disruption, overuse—all enabled by the functionality, design, and usability of social media—challenge any conventional definition of copyright as it is used to protect an author’s intellectual property. Minor changes to algorithms often make workers lose control over the dissemination of their posts and audience reach. Instagram, in particular, guards its intellectual property by keeping its algorithms confidential. In the attention economy, construction workers enrich Instagram with their creations, yes, but also their licenses, data, and usage time. Instagram lives off the copyrights of its creators; it doesn’t create any content. The rights it grants to each user and the companies that buy advertising space are the rights that all users have granted the platform by agreeing to its license-registration. Instagram’s gain is economic while the user’s gain is virtual: visibility that he or she is trying to profit from.


  1. According to Instagram’s Terms of Use, “We do not claim ownership of your content, but you grant us a licence to use it.” See “Terms of Use,” https://help.instagram.com/581066165581870/

  2. See “How our Service is Funded,” in Instagram’s Terms of Use; and “Publicité,” Centre d’études sur les médias, August 2024. https://www.cem.ulaval.ca/economie/donnees-financieres/publicite/

Richard Serra with Carlota Fay Shootman, Still from Television Delivers People, 1973, single-channel video, colour, sound, 5:55 min. © Estate of Richard Serra / Carfac

A creator’s anonymity, the year and location of a post, the place where it was produced, as well as the broadcasting of content across several platforms and under different profiles make their cataloguing and preservation complex, especially following existing data management processes that prioritize clear provenance, authorship, and dating. What’s more, the constant activity of users pushes collecting and research in a never-ending and immediately obsolescent direction. Since social networks are neither designed nor used for preservation, museums and research centres like the CCA are put in a difficult position when it comes to collecting digital media—one that has existed since its advent. These platforms offer the in-built advantage of preserving an enormous archive of videos on their platform. They are quasi-monopolies over easy and democratic content creation, but they do not offer the possibility of simple searchability. Their focus is on user and usage data and not on content, which is not catalogued, categorized, optimized, or organized to be found. In terms of the construction videos, referencing is limited, with little or no data or metadata provided on construction locations, countries, techniques, contractors or trades. The networks do not grant licenses to those wishing to reuse the videos outside their platform or to share them in research outputs. How, then, can researchers, museums, and research centres overcome challenges in collecting and preserving the historical, professional, social, volatile and ephemeral content that construction workers seem to have a growing interest in recording and sharing?

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