goldengod

Ceci n’est pas Photoshop by jurvetson

The photography sector of the blogosphere is in an uproar over a copyright controversy centering on Flickr’s most popular user, Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir. She recently found a UK site called Only-Dreemin that was selling her landscape photos under a similar name without permission or compensation.

Rebekka’s attempts to confront the site about the issue resulted in them taking down the photos, but they did not respond to requests for compensation. Considering she could prove, with evidence, at least $5,000USD of sales on top of standard copyright violation, this is pretty serious.

Being an active member, Rebekka posted about the experience to her Flickr account along with thumbnails of the stolen photos. She received an outpouring of support from the community to the tune of 100,000 views and 450 comments in less than 24 hours. That is, until Flickr decided to delete her post without warning.

Much has been written about this already, so I’m not going to go too in depth. Here is what’s been said so far:

• Yahoo Mirror of the original post on Rebekka’s Flickr
• Thomas Hawk’s first post on the incident with Only-Dreemin
• Rebekka writes about Flickr’s deletion of her content
• Thomas adds to Rebekka’s post with his own outraged thoughts
  
• Rebekka posts protest photo, Flickr mods apologize
• Flickr mods respond to community, claims that it was an “error in judgement”
• The rest of the blog-o-tron gets in on the action
• Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield provides an extended apology and clear explanation

One of the more interesting things this incident highlighted for me was the drastic difference in the ways people view personal rights on the Internet. Some see Flickr’s deletion as fair, since we all signed a EULA. Others see everything fall under the mythical Internet umbrella of free speech.

License Agreements and Terms of Use documents have become so draconian and prevalent in the last two decades that we no longer think of them as valid, enforceable, or even worth reading. Large portions of Internet users instead see the overall values of freedom on the Internet as being more important than the usage agreements. Legally, this makes no sense. Most users put it in the same social category as jaywalking and file sharing though; everybody does it.

I’m not the happiest with Flickr’s overall behaviour and response to this, but I’m not going to be leaving my account in protest or anything silly like that. Mistakes were made and Flickr is still the best on the block. I just hope they can avoid becoming too Yahoo-ized. If that happens, people will leave.

I have, however, abandoned my JPG Magazine account over the recent takeover by the CEO. His actions with regards to kicking the founders out and trying to rewrite the history of JPG have made me not want to participate in that community any more.