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.
tom
I’ll start by saying that I really do appreciate your contributions to the DCist Flickr pool. But the rationale behind our use of CC photos has remained constant: contributors hold the copyright to their posts and aren’t indemnified by Gothamist in any way. And, for most of the site’s existence, no contributors were being compensated. So it wasn’t a for-profit endeavor — not from the perspective of the people using and legally responsible for the use of the photos, anyway. I’m not a lawyer, but that’s the fact that made us regard use of CC photos as okay.
Some members of the Flickr community strongly disagreed with this interpretation, and eventually some authors and editors began to receive small stipends. Those two facts put an end to our use of noncommercially-licensed CC photos (except where implied permission was granted through the use of the “dcist” tag).
Anyway, hopefully it’s water under the bridge. But I do object to being characterized as treating CC with disdain — I really like and believe in the license. I think that the interpretation of what constitutes a commercial enterprise by a bunch of non-lawyers (I assume) with different viewpoints led to some acrimony, that’s all.
At any rate, I’m sorry for it and hope that you won’t hold back from contributing to the dcist photo pool.
MB
And I appreciate your post, Tom. I understand your argument for non-commercial use, and while I am among the first to acknowledge what a grey sea of uncertainty copyright can be, I’m pretty confident that DCist’s use of photos constitutes a commercial use, regardless of any internal arrangement it might have with its authors. If you’re ever interested, I’ll trade that analysis for a couple of beers (this lawyer works cheap, sometimes).
In any event, as you say, it’s water under the bridge. And I’m glad this went better than the last time we spoke on the subject.
Jamar Wroe
Interesting and great things you have here. Keep it coming! I’m usually looking to read on that subject.