Your Selfies At Hudson Yards's 'Vessel' Aren't Really Yours

NEW YORK — With its honeycomb structure, winding staircases and gleaming copper exterior, Hudson Yards's "Vessel" is the perfect Instagram bait. But the company responsible for the so-called interactive art installation can actually use the innumerable photos taken there however it wants.

The Vessel's verbose terms and conditions contain sweeping clauses governing the content showing the massive sculpture, which just opened to the public last week.

Anyone who enters gives Vessel's related company, ERY Vessel LLC, the "unrestricted" and "perpetual" right to use, reproduce and distribute any photos, video footage or audio recordings "depicting or relating to the Vessel." That essentially means the company can do whatever it wants with any artsy photos of the 150-foot behemoth that a visitor posts to social media or even their personal blog.

The terms also give the company license to store those photos in a database and give them to third parties for security marketing purposes. And photographers aren't supposed to use their own work "for any commercial purpose" without the company's written permission, the agreement says.

Even if you only appear in photos there and don't take any yourself, the Vessel can still use your name, voice, likeness and "all other aspects of (your) persona" for promotional and advertising purposes, according to the terms.

The Vessel is a centerpiece of sorts for Hudson Yards, the $25 billion development on Manhattan's west side that formally opened to the public on Friday. The policy's intent is to let Hudson Yards "amplify and re-share" photos posted on social media through its website and "social channels," said Jessica Scaperotti, the vice president of communications and public affairs for Related Companies, one of the developers behind Hudson Yards.

"This is a practice utilized at nearly all major attractions and we wanted to over communicate, be transparent and disclose to all users," Scaperotti said in an email. "We are refining the language to be more clear."

The agreeement doesn't give the Vessel the copyright to the photos, so visitors still technically own any they take there. But it's so broad that it could cover photos a visitor takes of the sculpture from across the river, or even a podcast recorded about a trip, James Grimmelmann, a professor at Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech, wrote on Twitter.

But the terms also have holes, Grimmelmann said — for instance, a person could put a photo on the internet under a Creative Commons license, allowing someone else to use it commercially.

"It's always amusing to see a clause this overreaching and also this badly drafted, like watching the mustache-twirling villain slip on the banana peel he dropped and fall face-first into a giant cake," Grimmelmann tweeted Monday.

The Vessel is free to visit with tickets, which are currently booked solid for the next two weeks, according to the Hudson Yards website.