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.

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.

Yet, the absence, concealment, or removal of standard copyright attributes is glaringly obvious on videos by construction workers on Instagram and TikTok. 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 unravels. 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 videos by other creators into their messages with no particular status or value. The sheer quantity of images and videos 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.

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 their 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.

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 they is trying to profit from.

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?