As you might have noticed, I quite enjoy Flickr, both as a tool and for its content. I’ve been a member for almost two years, making me one of the “old skool” members affected by Yahoo’s recent announcement that some changes will be coming. While I’m not as annoyed as Thomas Hawk, I’m casting a wary eye. I don’t particularly trust Yahoo (see, e.g., their use of my work on their commercial site – a Taj Mahal photo credited to me, but used without permission). However, I’ll stick around and see what happens. The folks running Flickr, of course, say that the changes are harmless.
In fact, I hope that it is much ado about nothing. Flickr is an incredibly easy way to share my pictures – none of the silly registration requirements for others to simply view the pictures. I’m also very happy with the way that Flickr has helped make the Creative Commons licensing scheme a functional, instead of theoretical, tool. In the last year alone, my CC licensed pictures have been used by a Korean university, travel dreamers, and heck, a couple of days ago Matthew Yglesias used a picture I took long ago to illustrate a post about an idea that happens to be near and dear to me – preserving the free flow of information from government. All because Flickr made it easy to clearly designate the CC license type I wanted.
Flickr has also been the conduit through which some of my work has been used outside of the CC model. Shanghaiist and DCist have used at least a half dozen of my pictures. (Note: I greatly reduced my contributions to the DCist/Gothamist empire when they displayed an utter disdain for the terms of CC licenses. They seem to have gotten their act together, but I’m still watching closely before I start participating again.)
It’s not all perfect: some places, like Yahoo or this travel site, just up and steal my pictures. And there’s not much to do about it, really. I suppose I could sue Yahoo, or demand that the Mexican travel site take it down. But it’s not really about the money or credit. It’s simple respect for the rights of others. They could have asked, and I would have almost certainly granted permission, but it’s apparently just too much trouble. At least they credited them, I suppose.
In any event, a bit of a Flickr ramble. I hope that the changes at Flickr mean I’ll still be rambling about them a year from now.
