There have been many stories over the past few years about copyright infringement on Flickr. To date most have been about individuals maliciously downloading the work of others to resell it as their own or companies using photographs commercially violating either the licensing restrictions of the photo or ignoring the need for a model release. What most remain unaware of is that Flickr fosters copyright infringement through their API. The most egregious part of this is that Flickr knows it. Even if done with out malice you can expect them to spin it that they do not foster copyright infringement through their API or, as you’ll later see, that they’re immune from being liable for improper use of their API because of their API terms of use.
6 months ago I realized that two applications leveraging Flickr’s API were ignoring photo licensing settings that every user configures in the “Privacy & Permissions” section of their “Your Account” page. Even now regardless of a photos designated licensing setting, whether Creative Commons or All Rights Reserved, these and other applications are publishing Flickr photos to 3rd party web sites and image files, high resolution if available, are being downloaded for reuse on personal computers. Worse still is that as recently as this weekend MyxerTones employed Flickr’s API inappropriately in effect making every Flickr photo available for sale as cell phone wallpaper for 2 days.
My first realization that there was a problem with how Flickr’s API was being managed was when I found a medium size version of my photo “Penny Harvest Rockefeller Center, New York” displayed on CoinNews.net in late December 2007 just after Christmas. I wrote the administrator of CoinNews.net immediately and found out that they were unaware of the copyright infringement. It was explained to me that they were just using a freely available plugin that enabled them to publish the photographic work of others from Flickr via specified tags. The blog plugin they were using, “FlickrRSS“, was pulling the most recent photos tagged with “penny harvest” whether designated as “All Rights Reserved” or not.
With in days of this discovery Dave Winer announced FlickrFan. FlickrFan creates a high resolution photo screensaver based on a user or a tag based Flickr RSS feed. Photos from the specified user(s) or tag(s) are downloaded from Flickr to a local computer without sensitivity to the copyright license chosen by the photographer. (See FlickrFan: A Heads-Up For License Conscious Flickr Photographers). I contacted Dave about this, but strangely he would only carry on a conversation through blog comments. He in essence refused my invitation to talk about how his application worked over the phone or via email. His comments created more questions than they answered. In the end it left me scratching my head as to who the responsible party is in such application development. Is Dave immune because he’s leveraging RSS feeds that pulls content in a set format determined by Flickr or is Dave responsible for constructing an application that properly factors in photo licensing information contained with in Flickr’s feeds and/or API?
To pursue the matter further I contacted Flickr in December via an email to their support team. My email went unanswered.
In early January I had the good fortune of taking part in a panel discussion, Media Web Meet Up III: The Producers, with Heather Champ who is the Community Manager at Flickr. I took the opportunity to let her know about this problem with either the Flickr API or how the API was being enforced. I was told that she’d get back to me as soon as possible. After a few polite email exchanges that spanned several months I never heard anything more from Heather on the matter.
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Click to Enlarge |
Then this weekend a Flickr contact (stargazer95050) let me know that my photo Out of the Gloom, which like all my photos has the “All Rights Reserved” license designation, was being sold as cell phone wall paper through MyxerTones.com. It turns out everyone’s Flickr photos were available for purchase through MyxerTones.com from July 3rd to July 5th, but Myxer disabled their Flickr integration after receiving numerous complaints. Myk Willis of Myxer addressed the growing chorus of concerned Flickr photographers aware of their Flickr integration gone wrong this past Saturday apologizing and explaining the situation from his perspective.
This latest incident is by far the most egregious, as the use of photographs from Flickr were being sold with out the consent of a single photographer, all while photo licensing terms were programmatically ignored. I’m glad to see that Myxer took the proper steps to disable their Flickr integration, but this is the latest example of Flickr playing with fire. On some varying level it is easy to point the finger at Myxer, Dave Winer (author of FlickrFan), Eightface (the company behind FlickrRSS) or any other developer/company for improperly using the Flickr API, but I would argue that responsibility ultimately lies with Flickr.
Flickr controls their API and they control who uses their API. They issue API keys and supposedly monitor who they give these keys to whether companies like Myxer, independent software developers like Dave Winer or blog plugin developers like Eightface. Flickr even goes so far as to provide Terms of Use for their API and the do their best to place responsibility of recognizing image licensing terms on the developers using the Flickr API.
Section 1a, sub-section ii
Comply with any requirements or restrictions imposed on usage of the photos by their respective owners. Remember, Flickr doesn’t own the images – Flickr users do. Although the Flickr APIs can be used to provide you with access to Flickr user photos, neither Flickr’s provision of the Flickr APIs to you nor your use of the Flickr APIs override the photo owners’ requirements and restrictions, which may include “all rights reserved” notices (attached to each photo by default when uploaded to Flickr), Creative Commons licenses or other terms and conditions that may be agreed upon between you and the owners. In ALL cases, you are solely responsible for making use of Flickr photos in compliance with the photo owners’ requirements or restrictions. If you use Flickr photos for a commercial purpose, the photos must be marked with a Creative Commons license that allows for such use, unless otherwise agreed upon between you and the owner. You can read more about this here: www.creativecommons.org or www.flickr.com/creativecommons.
So why blame Flickr? Regardless of Flickr’s terms with the developers utilizing their API I have an individual agreement, as every Flickr user does, with Flickr. That agreement states in section 9b of the Yahoo! Terms of Service…
With respect to photos, graphics, audio or video you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service other than Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available. This license exists only for as long as you elect to continue to include such Content on the Service and will terminate at the time you remove or Yahoo! removes such Content from the Service.
Note the bold text “solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available”. This is a slippery slope for Flickr and Yahoo as I’m uploading photos on Flickr to share with friends and the Flickr community. No where have I authorized an all encompassing distribution of my photography to third parties. Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying Flickr should shut down their API. I employ services that use Flickr’s API all the time with out problem. I authorize Moo to print cards with my photos, I authorize that my Flickr feed be picked up by Twitter and I authorize the use of my web site photo gallery to pull photos from Flickr. In each of these examples I have authorized how my photography is used in line with my licensing terms “All Rights Reserved”.
In fact if you look at your Flickr Account page in the Privacy & Permissions section you’ll find that you can authorize who downloads, prints, blogs, and searches your photos from Flickr. In my case I have opted to:
- Let no one download my photography other than myself
- Let no one print my photos other than myself
- Make my photography available through public searches
- Make my photography available to be blogged.
In the examples I’ve provided counter to my Privacy & Permissions settings …
- Flickr RSS via the Flickr API has enabled others to blog my photography outside of the safeguards set in place through the “Blog This” button on each of my Flickr photo pages.
Note: Flickr RSS is often used to provide image thumbnails on blogs and I have no problem with this, but medium size photos enable a resolution of display that is too great less a photographers consent. - FlickrFan via the Flickr API and RSS feeds has enabled others to download my photography when I have explicitly stated that no one should be able to download my photographs.
- Mxyrtones/Myxer via the Flickr API has enabled a company to sell and make available downloads of my photography with out any authorization or agreement.
Taking myself and my communications with Flickr out of the equation… this is a known problem. Other application developers have become acutely aware of the problem of leveraging Flickr’s API while respecting the copyrights of photographers and the licensing terms they specify. As recently as March 2008 this very topic has been discussed in the Flickr API discussion forum (API usage and image copyright …).
When you read this previously noted thread you begin to enter the realm of finger pointing. Ask a photographer who they blame when their image is published inappropriately through a 3rd party application using Flickr’s API and they’ll blame the developer. Ask the developer in this situation and they’ll blame the photographer for making their photographs available. In fact most developers quite logically will state that photographers should turn off their Privacy & Permissions setting to make their photographs available through public searches. Unfortunately that only removes photographs from tag searches, but not searches across pools or sets. On the other hand the counter argument is, “Why should a photographer turn off the ability of their photographs to be searched because a developer isn’t capable of programming the proper logic to display photographs with the proper licensing restrictions?”
What both parties have missed to date is that Flickr is ultimately responsible to honor their agreement with individual photographers and to manage their API in such a fashion that the Privacy & Permissions settings specified by Flickr photographers are honored. I am personally disappointed that Heather Champ did not pursue looking into this in a more timely fashion. I have gone above and beyond in giving her an opportunity to address my concerns privately through several email correspondences and a personal conversation. Seven months is a lifetime in this day and age of blogging on the Internet. That being said I don’t let developers off the hook either when it comes to responsibility of releasing applications using Flickrs’ API. Although Flickr has ultimate responsibility in managing their API and subscribers, developers have the responsibility to understand the law and not break it. When a photographer uploads photographs to Flickr they’re not signing away their rights to their work for 3rd party developers to do what they will with them.
If you’re a photographer who uses Flickr I would encourage you not to wait 7 months as I have before publicly talking about this. The only way Flickr is going to address and/or fix this problem is by Flickr members letting them know this situation is unacceptable.
[tags]Flickr, API, copyright, infringement, Dave Winer, FlickrFan, FlickrRSS[/tags]
API seems to be the biggest issue on flickr…
It makes it so powerful for various uses and at the same time its their Achilles heel, when it comes to treating their photographers like dirt.
I’ve personally done some sort of compromise by allowing my photos to be visible on public searches (within flickr) but disallowing them from 3rd party sites.
Anyway, this topic is something that should be raised to public awareness and as a result, I submitted it to digg. Let’s see, if it makes it to front page.
I couldnt agree more and have deleted all my work from Flickr and will be leaving when my Pro account is up in September. Flickr needs to get way more reponsible about who they give their API to and how they track their activity with it. I would like to think that my strongly worded fax to Myxer on Sunday helped them decide to shut down the API from their site. Their flagrant disregard for the law is sadly rife these days and I am sick and fed up with people telling me “well, that’s the internet”. It is precisely that attitude that is making it very hard for pro photographers like me to find a safe way of using the internet to promote their work. I am not naiive but I am thoroughly disappointed.
I was on Flickr two years and I think their attitude to helping people protect their copyright has been very poor indeed. The same people that have filled up their site to the brim with great images deserve a little more care when it comes to protecting that work. I dont expect miracles but I do expect a little more than Flickr dishing out their API to anyone who wants it and then leaving it up to us, the users, to track down abuse of that API and report it to Flickr.
So, I am done with Flickr. My blog is not thief-proof but it is not as much of a honeypot as Flickr, especially not one that opens up its code to anyone who wants to get industrial about stealing the content.
I think everyone should be done with Flickr!
Thanks for reporting it in this much detail. Very unfortunate, but not surprising at all.
Social networking sites are still learning that users can be very unforgiving when their concerns are ignored, and social networking site’s success depends very much on their users’ goodwill.
I have made most of my photos private and will be leaving flickr for good soon because of flickr’s “hands-off” attitude towards third-party copyright infringements via their API or RSS feeds. flickr’s approach seems to be to rely on the developers to respect the licensing of the photos on flickr, and then wait until enough noise is raised when an infringing use of the API key is discovered before acting. It is interesting that in all of the cases I have followed on flickr, the developer has always professed ignorance of the specifics of flickr’s API Terms of Use and, at times, of copyright law in general. Of course, by the time flickr pulls the API key–if they do–many horses are out of the barn, as was the case with Myxer.com.
I find it hard to believe that flickr is incapable of modifying their API so that the photographer’s wishes with respect to access by the API and licensing were ENFORCED, rather than make all photos available to developers and hope they respect them. Put out one big fire and you won’t have to keep putting out endless small fires.
I am so skeptical of flickr’s resistance to making the necessary changes to their API that I have come to suspect that they are tacitly encouraging copyright infringement.
For example it took well over a year for them to change a single line of text that previously had been worded to make it seem like All Rights Reserved images were in the Public Domain. Many copyright infringers pointed to the bit of text as justification for using protected imagery. (Whether this confusion was real or not it is impossible to say, but I suspect that wording provided convenient wiggle room for some of the developers.) Their new wording only a mild improvement.
flickr’s whole reason for being–and value as a web-based enterprise–is “photo sharing” and I am getting the strong feeling that they value the “sharing” aspect far more than the individual rights of their customers.
It is certainly true that photographers expecting that professional standards should be supported by flickr are swimming upstream. It was never meant to be a place for professionals to show their work. As far as I can tell, it was designed to be a place where you can post snaps of Nancy’s wedding or our trip to Belize. Most of these photos–and they make up the bulk of material on flickr, I suspect–are of interest only to friends and family. In fact flickr provides categories like “friends” and “family” to be used to control access to your photos if you want to do that. Photographers in this category could probably care less if someone used their photo in some other context. In fact, when a massive copyright violation is discovered and publicised on flickr, many of the people whose rights have been infringed are thrilled to be published or that someone actually “values” their work.
Professional photographers (or those doing professional-quality work) are simply in the wrong place if they expect support for their rights on flickr. It’s just not in flickr’s business interest to do so.
There are definitely some issues with the API and licensing terms. I enjoy the community aspects of the site, and Flickr has helped me gain exposure and make a few sales. On the other hand, I have no idea where my photos might appear because someone or some application is pulling them via an application using Flickr’s API. Hopefully this can get some mainstream play for discussion.
I have been balancing the pros and cons of Flickr for well over a year now and this news severely tips the scales – I’m deleting my account.
I hate to say it – but what you’re describing is what the API is for and what makes it so successful and great. Flickr was the first photo sharing site with such a great API and has enabled a whole new way of interacting with your own and other people’s content – and opened the door for countless other web services to do exactly that by being a prime example of what an open API can do for a service.
I doubt that Flickr would be where they are now if it wouldn’t have those open “Web 2.0” features like the highly detailed API.
There are many ways how you can opt-out of the API usage and if you feel the need to “protect” your images – either don’t put them on the web or disable the API for your account.
Good for you Annie. I have been doing the same since having my work ripped off and re-published [with copyright attributed to them] in Italy’s biggest newspaper, La Repubblica. Today I emptied my account,leaving just a goodbye message for my pals there and screengrabs of the Myxer.com website with my pics there and a nice stream of opinions and comments from people. As James said above, Flickr was not ever the place for pros but it had good traffic and a vibrant community. The attitude of the management leaves a lot to be desired though but what can one expect?
API was disabled for me, that didnt stop Myxer picking up images uploaded on dates before I disabled the API. I dont like this attitude of “well, that’s the internet’. Stealing is stealing, whether it is from a gallery, a shop or a website. The API needs to be policed better by Flickr. Period.
Jim, I wholeheartedly agree.
Though, unfortunately, what you describe is nothing new.
I pulled all my Flickr photos last year for a multitude of reasons. One of the reasons was the inability/unwillingness of Flickr to give control to photographers over their works in all respects.
For example, I found several of my images on so-called “Made for Ads” sites. These sites are template-based auto-generated sites that (due to the lack of any real content) simply pull a random selection of images from Flickr to display along their ads. These guys do not care whether a photo is ARR or CC or whatever. They just pull these images to display along their ads. Sickening. (And you can’t even send a DMCA to their web host, because you can not duplicate the infringing activity. Convenient.)
As I had one of my (unique) company names embedded along each image, I was able to find several of the infringers using Google. Boy, that was an eye-opener. I found hundreds of blogs who pulled images, unauthorized. Dozens of scrapers and MFA sites. When threatening legal action, I received curses, usually along the lines of “it’s RSS [or the Flickr API], so we can’t control what’s being displayed. If you don’t want to see your image, why do you publish them on Flickr anyway?”
I got so tired of this that I finally gave up and pulled all images. I suggest to every photographer to do the same.
And no, despite high view counts Flickr did not significantly improve my business. So it’s not that big a loss for me.
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Thanks for bringing this up. I had no idea. It’s disturbing.
It seems to me that by crafting the API to allow retrieval of images regardless of their respective licences, Flickr is creating an unacceptable ambiguity. Those who innocently use software that relies on the API and thereby infringe the photographers’ copyrights are correct to point the finger at Flickr. I have gotten into the habit of watermarking images I post to Flickr with an “All Rights Reserved” legend. I can see, however, that an innocent user fo such software might reasonably think, because the API allows him to pull down the image, that I had since granted a more permissive license.
Of course, the API also makes it far easier, it appears, for unscrupulous third-parties to willfully infringe. This is really Flickr’s responsibility. We place our images in trust with Flickr. The company has a moral and ethical responsibility (if not a contractual responsibility) to keep the images safe if we’ve not licensed them for distribution.
Jim,
Very scary but needed post for the photography community. Thanks for investing the time to put this up! It is partially because of these types of security holes with regards to safe guarding my legal rights that I have been very hesitant to use Flickr to date with my personal photography.
Likewise, there were a number of terms in the Flickr API Terms of Use that raised alarms for us at FocalPower when we reviewed it last year. Flickr is obviously more concerned about the community versus the members of the community. It was this disregard for helping photographers protect their images that spurred the development of the FocalPower Photo Asset Management service that we are currently in closed early stage testing on. The entire FocalPower team is excited about the capabilities that we are working on to help photographers address the continuing issues of protecting their photo assets while leveraging them in the diverse digital world we need to live in.
Excellent article. I am now removing all my snapshots from the internet.
So I run two services built on top of the flickr api. http://www.goodshotornot.com and http://www.smark.us however, goodshotornot requires you to submit your photos to a group pool in order to be included on the website and smark.us is available to the owners of a photo only. I would be very sad if flickr got rid of the api, as both of these sites have tuned into tools I use everytime I upload photos. (advert: check them out!)
I simply don’t trust people not stealing photos on flickr, and as such, I usually only upload photos that are watermarked in a corner, have a max size of 1200px on an edge, 72 dpi, and only 60% jpeg quality. Does this make it impossible to use my photos? No, but I think more photogs should be aware of the risks of putting photos on sites like flickr.
I’ve sold several photos to people who have messaged me on flickr asking to buy a print. If people rely on 3rd party tools for finding good content like flickrfan (and others), it’s fine with me if it helps me increase sales in the long run. 🙂 I have no problem with some people seeing a low res image of mine if (and only if) it results in an increase in sales for me. I think it’s important to weigh both sides of the case. If we get make it harder to build cool 3rd party apps, it may be harder to get yourself discovered by people who actually want to give you money.
Good post!
Thanks for this, it’s a lot of information to pass on and I’m sure many people will be grateful for your effort. I didn’t know about the extent of the Privacy & Permissions settings so have now changed mine. I’m not actually terribly restrictive of my images online and don’t mind personal use but would rather the API utilities not access it. I have always reduced the sizes of my digital images for Flickr so that high quality prints aren’t possible anyway except for non-artwork images (ie personal images, studio shots etc) which do not contribute to my working income anyway.
I am a flickr member also and was furious when I read this. I posted a topic in one of the forums on flickr but that topic was locked after only five responses. I also emailed flickr about this and I hope to get some kind of response. Soon.
Thanks for this post. I too am dismayed with the API and flickr protection in general. My account will be closed.
It does make me wonder about flickrs future – whether that is focussed on the ‘sharing’ aspects remains to be seen. Its interesting to think whether the sharing is going to be family and friends and snaps and (porn) and stuff or whether there will be a move into it becoming a site specifically for CC images – in direct competition with stock sites i guess.
I have always wondered how the Google image search manages to also override flickr settings. I realise there are multiple ways to download photos but I’m confused about this in relation to Google.
On flickr, if you have images set to no download you get the spaceball gif if anyone right clicks to download.
Yet if images are found via a Google image search, one can click on the “full size image” link in the frame at the top of the google screen and just right click and save from flickr. I realise that “full size†will depend on the individual photo concerned but in Google returns my own at medium size.
Why is this possible? Does Google use the flickr api? Is Google getting round settings? What’s the point of the flickr spaceball gif then?
ps uploading low res etc doesnt really solve it – my images were leeched for web use so print quality is not an issue.
I therefore in the process of moving my ‘sellable’ stuff to a an online agency and leaving flickr for the sharers.
What does API stand for?
Before reading this even, I started taking some images off yesterday because I see no benefit to using Flickr other than to show off your favorite places to amateurs. That is something I have no interest in doing considering how little the general public cares about obeying park rules and the de-valuing of photography.
API stands for “Application Programming Interface”. It’s in general a way for a web application to communicate with a web server. In the Flickr case, the API can receive queries from 3rd party services and will return certain parameters, e.g. image URL etc.
By the way, the API is just the tip of the iceberg, really. The bigger problems are the automatic RSS feeds, the options to embed photos into blogs, and the general viewability of images on the web – basically, anyone with a web browser and an internet connection can pretty much “see” most of the content on Flickr, unless the view is restricted by the user. Viewers do not have to be logged in to see the content.
This makes Flickr the # 1 source for image scrapers and image thieves. What makes it even worse is the fact that the number of images posted to Flickr is so gigantic that a withdrawal of just few portfolios, regardless of how attractive these are, does not really matter.
This reminds me of http://www.monuments.nu/2008/06/gva_bvl_the_sequence.html
Belgian newspapers were showing flickr pictures tagged with the name of a city on the webpage with news about that city, not taking into account the copyright restrictions.
The thing is, at its core Flickr is a photo sharing website. That’s what you sign up for when you join. From their about page:
——-
To do this, we want to get photos and video into and out of the system in as many ways as we can: from the web, from mobile devices, from the users’ home computers and from whatever software they are using to manage their content. And we want to be able to push them out in as many ways as possible: on the Flickr website, in RSS feeds, by email, by posting to outside blogs or ways we haven’t thought of yet. What else are we going to use those smart refrigerators for?
“If we get make it harder to build cool 3rd party apps, it may be harder to get yourself discovered by people who actually want to give you money.”
I think you’re missing the point. It isn’t about making it harder to build applications, it is about Flickr not holding up their end of the bargain when it comes to license and privacy designations. If you want to make your images available via something like Flickr Fan then good for you, but if Jim doesn’t, then his images shouldn’t be picked up by that application.
Secondly, you have to know your market. Just because people see your images doesn’t mean that they are reaching the appropriate market (buyers).
Thanks to all that have commented and Dugg this post. For those of you who have stated that this was the final straw and reason enough for you to opt out of Flickr entirely I respect your opinions, but a problem will never be fixed unless it is made known to the people that can fix it. I have tried to individually make Flickr aware of this problem, but to get Flickr to address the issue it will require more than one voice. I still have hope that Flickr will take the rights of individuals seriously and put it as a top priority in their development cycle. Time will tell.
@Chip Google has court backing in being able to provide thumbnails of images for search purposes. These thumbnails merely reference the original. They’re not reselling the thumbnail. This is an independent issue to the Flickr API concerns I’ve relayed.
Court Says Google Thumbnails From Adult Site Don’t Violate Copyright
@Mark Zanzig thanks for clarifying what API stands for for Richard. RSS feeds do pose a challenge. One that is far different than the concern raised by Chip with Google thumbnails. Whether Flickr or not, RSS feeds have the potential to handle image files in ways that require photographers to rethink how they display their content or come to terms in accepting various formats of web publishing. What is central to this and the larger point made in my photo is that photographers have the right and ability to determine how and when their photography is distributed. For some RSS feeds are acceptable while for others it is not. This is a personal decision that we all have to evaluate and make choices around.
@Mike The root of the newspaper image violation you’ve linked to is a result of the issue I’ve raised in this post.
You guys want to have your cake and eat it too. You want to put your work out there digitally, in high resolutions, but you want it to be protected. It’s impossible. If you put your stuff out there, people are going to steal it. End of story. No amount of cripped APIs, copyright/copyleft legalese, or social-network-company-ranting is going to stop this from happening. If you want to keep your work private, then keep it in the analog world, or make your photos “Friends Only” and remove them from public searches.
@Jake Let me be perfectly clear. When signing up for Flickr I did not forfeit the rights to my photography away. Flickr may indeed be a photo sharing site, but they have specified Terms of Use and Privacy settings that supposedly enable photographers to decide how and when their photos can be shared. My post merely highlights that their system is broken.
If I do something in violation of their ToU I am held accountable for it and required to take corrective action. By your logic if they’re in violation of that same agreement by Flickr or Yahoo, not to mention in violation of the law, I am to accept it. That is illogical. I, as every user of Flickr, have entered into a legally binding agreement in how private information and assets in the form of photographs are to be distributed on Flickr. If that agreement is violated by either party then it is a requirement that teh offending party take the necessary steps to comply with it.
Just because I post content on the Internet I’m not forfeiting my right to anything. Every service you sign up for whether you pay for it or not is based on a legally binding agreement. Your email, your photos, your personal information, etc. The companies behind these services will sue you or force you to comply to any and all agreements you enter into with them. To forfeit your rights “because you’ve posted it on the Internet” is not only foolish, but extremely short sighted.
@David Bowman see the comment above this one
To be honest, this isn’t Flickr’s fault. All of us set a license on each photo we upload, which by default, is All Rights Reserved. Flickr isn’t infringing on anyone, it’s the people who are developing these apps that are infringing.
Flickr has a special API function call (http://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.photos.licenses.getInfo.html) This function call will tell an application author the current license status of any photo on the site. If the person who writes the application doesn’t properly check the license status, and they aren’t using the photo in a manner that would have would be considered fair use, then they are responsible for the infringement,not flickr.
IMHO, flickr has done everything within reason to help protect people’s photos. Nothing stops someone from manually taking any publicly viewable photo from flickr if they really want to. I’m a software engineer during the day and let me tell you , if someone can view your image on the web, then they can save it. The whole spaceball.gif thing is a joke. (http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/08/download-flickr-photos-protected-by.html) Disabling right clicks? It’s a joke too! You’re just wasting your time. It’s like locking the doors on a convertible! If you are paranoid about people stealing your photos, watermark them in a way that they are of no use to someone or don’t put them online in the first place. People who put their photos inside of flash applications are also fooling themselves, it’s trivially easy to take photos out of a flash application as well! (I do wish flickr supported watermarking as a site feature, that’d be something I’d love for them to do!)
The apps people write should check the license and only use the photo if the license allows it or it’s consistent with fair use rights. Making the API more restrictive isn’t the answer. Even if Flickr had no API, I could easily write my own web browser that could goto flickr, request a page the same way firefox does, parse the html, lookup the image locations, and go about my business. In the web industry this is called “scraping” and it puts a high load on web servers. This is one the reasons a lot of sites offer an API. People are going to be doing this stuff anyway, they just make it a bit easier so that when people do it, it doesn’t break the site for everyone.
Flickr should quickly respond to complaints from photogs that 3rd party sites are illegally using their photos, but anything more than that, is going to far and going to cripple one of the things that makes flickr great.
..mike
Re Google.
Google does return thumbnails, and a the link to the original site on flickr is fine, but it’s also presented within a top frame – where you can get to the medium size on flickr without the spaceball gif. I just wondered what the point of flickr’s spaceball gif was really.
Thanks for the info and link. interesting.
Hey everyone, David Bowman is offering up his car for free! He’s clearly not a guy who wants to have his cake and eat it, too. No door lock, alarm, kill switch or LoJack is going to really stop a determined thief*, so if he didn’t want it stolen, he wouldn’t have parked it out in public on the street! Have at it — thanks, David! 😉
* Copyright infringement is not theft, but the analogy is still apt.
yeah, that analogy doesn’t really work too well ‘cuz in the case of the photo, david still has his photo if you steal it. . .
also, fyi, thomas hawk has a post about this post along with his own long series of comments:
http://thomashawk.com/2008/07/how-every-flickr-photo-ended-up-on-sale.html
If Flickr keeps ignoring their responsibilities, it’s perhaps time to move to a different photo sharing site.
SmugMug has similar tagging features, and a great API that actually obeys photo restrictions. They’ve even implemented OAuth.
Forgot to mention that they are a pay site, though. Perhaps you get what you pay for.
@Shan
SmugMug has an API just like flickr. If your photos are publicly viewable, you can get get them, no matter what service you use. If your photos are not publicly viewable, you can’t get them on smugmug and you can’t get them on flickr. There is no difference. The flickr API does not give anyone “special” access. If a photo is private or not viewable by the public, then the API doesn’t provide any access to it, no matter what service you’re using.
I just don’t understand what would people would like flickr to do? They let you make your photos private, what more do you want? 🙂
Jim,
Thanks for a very thought-provoking post. These are indeed trying times for a massive number of creative people whose footing has been destabilized by this era of instant, zero-cost distribution of digital content on the internet.
As you mention in your article, I am the CEO of Myxer, and Myxer did indeed hatch a Flickr integration feature over the weekend. We quickly disabled the feature when we received complaints that the content we were featuring on Myxer was not being appropriately filtered based on the license information associated with each photo.
Myxer has been operating for over three years with a mission of making it easy to get content to mobile phones. One thing we’ve heard from our users time and again is that they want easier ways to get photos from sites like Flickr to their phones. While we apparently fumbled in the first implementation of integration, I would respectfully submit that it was never our intent to use content from Flickr users in any way contrary to the original intent of the poster.
One minor correction I would like to make to your post is that Myxer did not offer any Flickr content “for sale” on our site. Rather, Myxer displayed content from Flickr in our search results, with full attribution and direct links back to the hosting page on Flickr. Myxer allowed users to send the images to their phone’s web browser free of charge (we’re an ad-supported company).
For what it’s worth, I am a huge fan of Flickr, and have long respected the community of creative people that make it what it is. While there may indeed be aspects of the Flickr API that make it prone to abuse, I have seen firsthand how the openness of the API has fostered innovation across a large spectrum of web companies.
I again apologize to all of those in the Flickr community who felt violated by our integration, and I assure you we will very carefully evaluate all of the details of our integration with third party sites going forward. I sincerely believe that beyond this temporary period of disruption lies a better future that brings amazing new opportunities to content creators such as yourself.
Best,
Myk Willis
Founder & CEO, Myxer
@Myk Thanks for replying to the post. As mentioned in some of the other forums you’ve posted to whether the images were sold out right or offered to support a revenue stream through advertising it really makes no difference. As described the ability of your company to earn money is dependent on the flow of creative assets such as photographs. To stay on topic the core issue here is the lack of filtering to exclude photographs with restrictive licensing terms in your Flickr integration.
The fundamental right of every photographer with restrictive licensing terms such as “All Rights Reserved” is to regulate when and how their photographs are used. “Regulate” is a pretty formal term… in the end it’s a matter of a photographer granting “permission”. That’s not all that complicated of a concept. We ask permission for things all the time.
Whether a fan of Flickr or not the manner in which you employed Flickr integration completely disregarded that will of each photographer with similar licensing preferences and went counter to the law. Pulling Flickr integration from your site was a wise move. I think it’s fair to say you narrowly missed disaster with photographers filing copyright infringement lawsuits. While you narrowly missed getting tagged by several such lawsuits in this situation it is only a matter of time before Flickr or someone else suffers a different fate.
If Flickr does what you ask, far fewer people will be able to find and view my photos.
No disrespect meant to you. I selfishly think you should move your photos off Flickr entirely. I like the fact that I can use the Flickr APIs to display my photos even though they are All Rights Reserved. I like that people can find links to my photos in these third party apps. If someone decided to sell my photos, I’d blame the people doing the selling. I wouldn’t blame the FLickr API, I wouldn’t blame Google Image Search.
I WANT as many people as possible to see my photos.
I wish you all the best in control of your photos, but if you don’t like Flickr, for my part I hope you find someplace else that you like better instead of screwing up the place I like. Since other places with stronger more draconian measures ALREADY exist, there’s no need to screw up Flickr — just go to those sites.
After all, its a a better internet if there are different sites for different purposes, yeah?
Hoping we can coexist…
@Mike O Thanks for the reply. The issue at hand isn’t about messing up Flickr’s API merely Flickr abiding by and enforcing the rules they set with their API. Facebook doesn’t seem to be suffering when users accept using applications versus those applications being forced upon them. Why would it be any different with Flickr? I opt in to use Moo cards as I opt in to use several other services employing the Flickr API. Signing up with a services such as Flickr doesn’t equate to you abandoning your rights. This does equate to an opt-in versus opt-out discussion. Currently the law for other types of services are clearly in line with an “opt-in” requirement. If a company does not abide by the “opt-in” rules they’re subject to penalties. Flickr for all intents in purposes is attempting to abide by “opt-in” rules but ignoring them or turning a blind eye to them.
Don’t mistake “draconian measures” for a lack of education in today’s social networking crowd.
@Myk. I have corrected the posts I left on Flickr about content being for sale on your site. However, offering something for free is usually about enticing people back to spend money so it amounts – at the end of the day – to the same thing. Plus, giving away my work also devalues it. One of the problems with being a photographer nowadays is trying to actually keep some value in the work.
And with all respect, this line in your message here and on Flickr: “it was never our intent to use content from Flickr users in any way contrary to the original intent of the poster. ”
…betrays either a complete lack of the ability to read [clause 2 of the API – about 15mm down from the top of the document – makes very plain the responsibility of developers/keyholders to respect the permissions of each Flickr user]; or, perhaps, an unwillingness on you part to admit that you were trying to get away with something whilst hoping that no one would notice; lack of knowledge of copyright or a complete disregard for it.
@ Others: A few people here have again grought up the whole issue of ‘if you dont want it stolen, borrowed or taken then dont put it on the web’. This is something we really need to work to get away from as a catch-all excuse for some people’s behaviour. Despite using watermarks, despite putting low-rez content online, I still get ripped off by everyone from large newspapers down to small start-ups wanting some free content. Even if some of them asked if they could use my stuff that would better than how things are now. As people went online, their manners seemed to go offline.
Why are the choices as stark as ‘if you want to use the web well, then prepare to get your work stolen left right and centre’. Or, ‘well, dont put your work anywhere near the web’.
And @Mick O: what is draconian about me wanting a site I belong to and pay money to, to help me protect what is owned by me? I want as many people to see my pictures as possible too, it’s my livelihood so the more people who see them the better for me. But as so many people have pointed out, if I care about not having them taken and mis-used by people, then I seem to be left with the option of not using the internet at all.
Very sad that it has come to: “stop f***ing moaning about your work getting ripped off, this is the internet… that’s the way it is.”
If you don’t want your photos used without permission, DON’T UPLOAD THEM TO THE INTERNET. Plain and simple.
Anyhow, as long as the photos are still hosted on the Flickr website and haven’t been copied to anyone’s server, it’s not a copyright violation.
Read Flickr’s terms of service. You agreed to have those photos used in their searches, feeds and API. You don’t like it, don’t use it.
Use Adobe Bridge instead. It’s 100% secure because it’s not on the internets.
@Sean McGee Read the post and then read your comment. Every point in your comment is addressed in the post. Don’t waste my or any other persons time if you’re not going to read what was written.
Hear, hear, Jim.
Jim
Thanks for taking the time to write such a well thought out post on the subject.
What I find interesting about this discussion (and the discussion over at Flickr) are those who say “don’t put it online if you don’t want it stolen”. Do people tell musicians and bands not to create MP3s if they don’t want their work stolen? Do people tell the movie houses that piracy is something that should be expected and tolerated because people CAN steal? I find it interesting that the artists (photographers) are attacked versus those stealing their work.
The internet has clearly created issues for all types of artists wishing to share their work online.
This posts brings much needed attention to some of the issues that photographers face online – Great Post!
Great post Jim. It highlights the reasons I don’t post many images to any other site than my own or my stock agency. Social networking has simply turned into social copyright free-for-all.