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.
Click to Enlarge |
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]
The reason Flickr hasn’t replied to you is because they are too busy:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/foreverdigital/2651122086/
If you look closely, you’ll even see Heather in this video. She’s busy too apparently.
It’s shame that they can’t just create an enabler that simply prevents API’s from “stealing” photos. Just leaving up to the API creator and hiding behind T’s & C’s is ridiculous.
Mark Zanzig @ 76: I hadn’t noticed the lack of EXIF data on most sizes — that is _so_ not-cool! But I did notice, when I checked just now, that the JPG comment field, the bit you can fill in by hand when doing “save as” from GIMP (and I presume Photoshop, if not the whole gamut of editing software) _is_ retained. *whew* At least on the medium an thumbnail sizes, the two I checked. So my copyright notice and email address remain attached, if a downloader thinks to look there, until someone deliberately removes it.
I do hope most people attempting to discover the provenance of an image would think to check the GIF or JPG comment field, or run the ‘strings’ program on the file. But I’ve no idea how well the real world matches up to my wish.
Thass the Real Beauty of having my Ass + Crap NIPSA’d + BANNED from Public Spaces on Flickr!! Hell I couldn’t even Post to MY Own Friggin’ Flickr Groups!!
Nice not having to Deal with Pesky People like GETTY IMAGES Pawing Me + trying to shove outrageous scads of $$$ Moolah for my Lovely Photographs********
BILLY WARHOL NOT FOUND!!
TAKE ME TO THE KITTENS!!*************
;PPP
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@Dave (90) *EVERY* one of my images has information including copyright, in its EXIF. It’s true that many people don’t use it, but for those of us who do and who care the fact that FLICKR is removing our data, altering our files without permission or notice, is extremely disturbing.
The reason this comes into play with the Orphan Works legislation currently under consideration is this: if someone gets that EXIF-removed file they no longer have any way of telling that it’s my image – it’s an “Orphan,” and now they can use it any way they want and I’ve no legal option to sue for damages.
I understand that there are a great number of people who don’t care – they take pictures for fun, share them, give them away and have no thought of ever “owning” them. That’s fine, they can give their stuff away all they want. All we’re asking for is that those of us who *do* care are given the courtesy that the copyright law provides.
Right onthe mark here, Steve. I have no problem, intrinsically, with the recent trend for everybody to be able to be a designer [build their own website], be a journalist [write their own blog], or be a photographer [pick up a digital camera and put some pics online]. That’s great. But, there are those of us who chose this as a career, nearly bankrupted themselves with the materials costs of film and paper for three years of art school, slogged long and hard to get pics published before you could do it yourself and who still need to make a living at it to feed their kids.
Despite the fact that copyright and IP are relics of a bygone, pre-internet age and need updating, they are all we have. If a company gives me the choice of opting in to certain restrictions of usage to display my work on a website I have paid to use, those wishes should be respected. Flickr just throw up their hands and say ‘Not us, its the thirdparties who use our API”. Whilst they work in new technologies, their excuses for failing to deliver a service are as old as the hills:”Not our fault mate, it was him”.
And then we have everyone around us saying; “Dont like it? Dont use the internet.”
The orphaning of images by stripping out data: oh, how I hope that comes around to bite Flickr on the ass. But, as usually happens, these corporations are so embedded into the lobbies and corridors of power [we live in a corpocracy in all but name], that they will sway Congress I am sure, to sthrow out the bill or change it to favour them. Citing ‘the changed landscape and concept of ownership and intellectual property that has occured with the internet” as their reason.
All the while they will continue to make money with their corporations, hoovering up and re-distributing content they havent had to pay a newsroom full of journalists or studio full of photographers to create. Superb solution … for them.
I am all for sharing and for power to be given to the average man in the street to contribute. But, there is a difference [and I am not making an elitist statement, it is just a fact] between some people who have trained their whol lives to do something and people doing it themselves at home. There are some very talented individuals who have had their light hidden under a bushell who have come to the fore with the blog and photo-sharing revolution. But, there is a lot of dross too. Professionals are still required. But how do we make a living?
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I am not a pro shooter. I’m an enthusiastic amateur
street shooter who has a lot to learn. And I’m new
to Flickr. To all of you people who are either pro
shooters or, because of this article have given up
on Flickr, have any of you ever thought about
watermarking your images with something like
Picmarkr? I just googled the subject and I found
Picmarkr.
Many of you in this thread stated that you like
the Flickr community though the AFI matter is
the straw the broke the camels back. Because
of that some of you shut down your Flickr
account. Well what about watermarking your
images with Picmarkr? I’ve never watermarked
an image before. But after reading this
article I think I better get up to speed on
it pronto. Please let us know the pros and
cons of using something like Picmarkr to
watermark your Flickr images.
http://picmarkr.com/
PicMarkr, whilsy useful, is not that useful. I had 1300 pics on Flickr, most of which already had small watermarks in the corner but I needed to put bigger ones in.
PicMarkr does 10 pics maximum in one sweep. The first ten I tried to do, using an image overlay and not a simple text one [which is very easy to edit out] took me 15 minutes to get right. 130 x 15 minutes. That’s 30 hours.
Piknik, the inbuilt tools for Flickr, is even less intuitive, more bogged down in its swanky Flash interface than offering real tools. Bulk watermarking is only available in the Pro version: $24.95 per year.
Flickr’s replace function was broken all weekend.
Bulk replacing of images is also not possible.
Flickr needs a basic, watermark adding tool in the Uploadr. Should have been there ages ago.
You will hate me for saying this but honestly, if you didn’t want to share your photos, why did you store them in a public gallery like Flickr? There are other photogalleries out there which I know are limited to pro photographers.
And moreover, if you were serious about sharing your photos discreetly, you wouldn’t even have put them online at all. The internet has not been given boundaries yet, and of course it is human nature to want to circumvent and break these boundaries.
At least put a watermark next time, that way you can trace your photos more easily if you suspect that the rest of the world is using them without your permission.
Funny…. the API everyone is villifying also offers the ability for someone to write a tool that can do watermarking in bulk. In fact it’d be easy to do. I could probably write one in a few hours. Unfortunately you’d have to download the original of every picture in order to watermark it and replace the old one. This is a lot of bandwidth. I’d write one, but I’d have to charge for bandwidth usage since it’s not cheap.
Wow, there are some really uneducated people out there.
The frequent response amounting to “If you don’t want it stolen, don’t put it not he Internet” strikes me as similar to the logic of “If you don’t want your child kidnapped and raped, don’t send them to school”. Theft is criminal. Criminals, ncluding accomplices who aid them, should be prosecuted. The rest of us shouldn’t have to cower in our homes, or stay off the Internet, to accomodate the crooks.
These examples show how easy technology has made it for companies to ignore the rights of content creators, including both professional and amateur photographers. Congress is about to make those mistakes a way to permanently separate all of us from copyright protection of our works with the Orphan Works Act of 2008.
Here are some sample photography industry statements opposing the proposed bill:
http://www.asmp.org/news/spec2008/orphan_update.php
http://www.nppa.org/news_and_events/news/2008/05/orphan02.html
Please pass on news of this pending legislation and encourage family and friends to contact their elected representatives by email using the automated form at this link:
http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/issues/alert/?alertid=11442621
For people that (miss)use flickr as a business tool, this may be of interest.
http://blog.flickr.net/en/2008/07/08/the-flickr-collection-on-getty-images/
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@Mike: I think you misread me; I dont mind sharing my photos just within the bounds of the terms I agreed to and the permissions I set on my Flickr stream. Your point is a bit like saying, ‘well, if you didnt want you car stolen, why did you go out driving and park it in the street?”
Plus, sorry, I read that Getty item today on the storobist.blogspot website. Quite a long article there about it. Lots of mention of different concepts, usage, benefits for Getty customers etc. No mention as yet of any remuneration for photographers. I emailed Getty Japan today to find out more about it.
to the people saying “if you dont want them stolen, dont put them on the internet”:
Ok, if you have anything stolen, it’s now your fault for leaving it there, you cant do anything about it, you just have to accept that.
Does that seem perfectly fine for you?
_____
This is something that has really pissed me off. I origianlly joined Flickr because it was somewhere to put my photos so i could show them to people easily, get feedback on them from other people, comment on other people’s images and see other images that interest me.
This also reminds me of a case that happened recently where someone was taking loads of images from flickr, putting them onto clocks and selling them on ebay. I’m not sure what happened about it, but the people whose images were being used were pretty annoyed.
If I post software from Microsoft and someone illegally downloads it. Would I go to jail for stealing. I am pretty sure I would. just something to think about
Can someone please clue me in to exactly how these photos are being stolen? There is a lot of hype going on here but very little actual fact.
If I have an image on flickr, and the url of that image is http://www.flickr.com/foo.jpg (say it’s my photo) and then someone else goes to their own blog and says: “I saw this image on flickr, it’s awesome” and then links to my flickr photo like this: <a href=”http://flickr.com/photolink”> <img src=”http://flickr.com/foo.jpg”> Is that stealing? 100% NO. They didn’t copy my photo, they linked to it, and included it on their page, but they still referenced my original photo. If I take the photo off of flickr, I take the photo off of their web page. Does that make sense? Now, if they saved a copy of my photo and put it on their web page, that’s 100% completely different, as they took my content. But as long as they simply link against my image, I’m ok with that.
@alfie: Putting unwatermarked photos online is more like saying “‘well, if you didnt want you car stolen, why did you go out driving and park it in the street leave the doors open and the keys in the ignition with a giant sign that said please drive me away?†You have to take some responsibility for your own stuff.
Ok, so checking on some legal decisions, technically you’re right. Linking to a photo even off site is not permitted. I can’t say I agree with that, but that’s the way things are by default. I’d check the flickr tos, afaik, and I could be wrong here too, but flickr allows people to link to images provided that they aren’t the fullsize and they always link back to the photo’s flickr page. Court decisions do however say that linking directly to images as thumbnails is ok. Unfortunately as best as I can tell, they don’t define what a thumbnail or “smaller image” is. Are they 75×75 px? Or 50% smaller than the original? There is leeway here to argue on either side.
I think the best things for you to do if you worried is to 1) watermark everything and 2) not use flickr. Flickr was really established as a place for sharing photos, I understand you want to maintain control over your images, and that’s your right. But why not use a site that caters more to protecting (however futile) your images. I don’t think its that flickr doesn’t care, I think its that the features you want are contrary to flickr’s design goals. I hate to use another analogy, but knowing this about flickr is like Metallica putting their music on Napster and then complaining people are downloading it illegally. At least in my view.
Quoted from “http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/linking-copyrighted-materials”:
“Inline linking involves placing a line of HTML on your site that so that your webpage displays content directly from another site. We now commonly refer to this practice as embedding. For example, many bloggers embed videos from YouTube on their blogs to illustrate a point or initiate discussion. While there is some uncertainty on this point, a recent case from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that inline linking does not directly infringe copyright because no copy is made on the site providing the link; the link is just HTML code pointing to the image or other material. See Perfect 10, Inc. v. Google, Inc., 508 F.3d 1146 (2007).”
I knew this had been reviewed before. It’s legal, flat out.
If you’re posting an image on the internet, it can be stolen. API’s make it very easy, but even if flickr turned off all API’s, it’s still very easy to steal images using a variety of tools (check out wget, for example). I think watermarking is the only solution. I’m going to start putting my email address and copyright on all photos I upload to the internet. That will stop 99% of casual theft, and also remove any ambiguity as to the allowed usage of my photos.
“I hate to use another analogy, but knowing this about flickr is like Metallica putting their music on Napster and then complaining people are downloading it illegally. At least in my view.”
I dont think so. Metallica didn’t put their music on Napster and neither did most other music acts. Napster users put Metallica’s music on Napster.
Even if it were, that’s as logical as saying if you don’t want to get hit on, then don’t be a woman.
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@Richard: I’m saying putting your photos on flickr (a site that advertises itself as a way to share photos) is LIKE metallica putting their music on napster. I know they didn’t really do that. Before you put someone puts photos on Flickr, they can try it for free and see what kind of content controls are in place. If he or she didn’t like what they offered, no one forced them to sign up for an account. Signing up for an account, knowing what they offered in terms of rights management, and then complaining it’s not satisfactory after the fact is quite silly.
Any photo on any site can be a victim. It’s sad but true, NEVER posting any of your photos online is the only way to keep them safe other than a really big embedded watermark.
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Thanks man. I didn’t know about those sites. I’ll have to check them out. 🙂
@mike “Signing up for an account, knowing what they offered in terms of rights management, and then complaining it’s not satisfactory after the fact is quite silly.”
Note that Flickr claims to be pro-photographer and claims to have protections in place so that a photographer can mark their work as Private. The complaints arise when Flickr’s API doesn’t match the rest of their claims.
@mike “you have to take some responsibility for yourself”
the photographers DID take responsibility, by using the very “Private” flag that Flickr offered.
@steven: The API does NOT give access to private photos. Everyone has been saying it does, but it doesn’t! That’s what makes no sense about this entire thread. If you mark your photo as private, the API will refuse to provide any information about the photo.
Here is an example: I have marked one of my photos with photo_id: 2468587348 as being private.
Here is the flickr API call to get information about that photo:
http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.photos.getInfo&api_key=55bd1b6c3ea752b1342b0e7facf3ee26&photo_id=2468587348&api_sig=273b44eec638d98d6e78981710af5b98
Get a blank page? That’s because the flickr API will not provide info about private photos if the the person who is making the API call is not the owner of the photo and they do not know the photo’s secret value.
Now compare this with the api info request for photo 2468588282, this photo is completely public.
http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.photos.getInfo&api_key=55bd1b6c3ea752b1342b0e7facf3ee26&photo_id=2468588282&api_sig=a118db1554cc4ce1fc6cabee0d57b55e
As you can clearly see the API returns no information for private photos.
See? This WHOLE thread makes no sense. 1) The courts say embedding other peoples images on your own web page is fine without their permission because you aren’t copying their work, simply referencing a copy that they has already put online by the copyright holder (see one of my earlier comments citing a summary of the 9th circuit court of appeals’ ruling). 2) The flickr API doesn’t provide any access to content that it’s not supposed to (as you can see for yourself above). People are getting all up in arms about something that they don’t fully understand. Sigh.
—–
I know that some people who have commented make their living off of their images, and they need to fight to protect that. And I completely sympathize. In the software industry (where I work) this happens all the time. However, times are changing, people’s definitions of copyrights and expectations of fair use are changing. Look at what happened to the music biz and hollywood with the DMCA.
The DMCA was supposed to keep those industries safe from pirates. What happened? The law went into effect and they started suing their customers. Sales plumet, illegal file sharing goes through the roof, and an entire generation grows up thinking the music biz is evil and ready to pirate mp3’s without a second thought. Would you buy a CD from a company who tried to sue you? The harm these antiquated views has caused, have cost the recording industry more money than the original file sharing ever would have.
Now compare this withwhat bands like radiohead have done with their music. They’ve ditched the label and started giving their music away for free and asking their fans to pay whatever they think its worth. The band hasn’t released how much they took in from this, but estimates say the band made more from this “donation” experiment than they would have made if they went through a traditional record label.
Now I’m not suggesting people give their photos away for free, but a band like radiohead isn’t fighting the way culture is evolving, they’re moving along with it. They’re going to succeed because they are keeping their options open. I’m simply suggesting we do the same.
Alfie Goodrich: thanks for the honest
(and detailed) assessment of PicMarkr.
Is there a good watermarking program
one could use on images that are stored
on Flickr? One that you would recommend?
I’m not going to leave Flickr just yet.
Heck, I just joined Flickr. I have
approximately 400 pictures I need
to watermark.
Nice site!
Thank you
http://ipii.ru
I’ve never used SmugMug, but I like
how when you right click on an image
of theirs you’re blocked from stealing
it. I’m not sure what that blocking
technique is called. Whatever it’s
called, here’s hoping that it can’t
be circumvented by a savvy computer
user. A thief might be able to get around
something like that by going to ‘view’
and then ‘source’. I’m not sure though…
Jim
Firstly thank you for bringing this to my (and others) attention. I checked to see if any of my pix were on the MyxterTones.com site and I couldn’t find any, that may well be because the Flickr link has been taken down now?
However,in the past three weeks I have found a number of my pics on other peoples Blogs, lifted directly from Flickr, and for obvious reasons it made me angry. So much so that it has been my intention to close my Flickr account. However, before I take the final step, can I ask you please (and I mean this most sincerely and not in anyway facetiously way) why have you not closed your Flickr account? Your pictures are truly excellent, far better than mine, and yet with all your knowledge of the technicalities of API’s and RSS feeds etc, (I know very little), you still haven’t closed your Flickr account.
Whatever your reply to this is, it is immaterial, because I am closing my account whatever. I’m sick of all the controversy and the value of the CC licences etc.
and the basic insecurity of the site.
Regards
Mark G.
@Tupart yes, it can be circumvented at least to get a low-res screen capture. If it’s displayed on your screen, it’s capturable. SmugMug does have settings similar (though better?) to what Flick offers, for privacy. Be sure to read these two posts, by the SmugMug CEO, and understand the difference between privacy and security, there are multiple settings.
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/01/28/your-private-photos-are-still-private/
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/02/08/big-privacy-changes-at-smugmug/
I am getting bored of people asking ” If you do not want your pics to be stolen, why put up in flickr”.. blah.. blah… I have one question for them… If you walk into an exhibition, do you think you can grab anything that is on display and walk out… just like that?.. Will you dare to tell the cops that you have the right to steal stuff just because it was put up for display?
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Nishant @ 140: A better analogy — if they walk into an exhibition, do they think it would be proper to pull out their own camera and take a picture of any of the works that are hanging there instead of buying the piece from the artist?
This ducks the whole, “but it’s not the same as physical theft because you still have it,” counterargument, and more closely mirrors what’s being complained about here.
To spell out what I think Nishant is saying for anyone still thinking access=permission …
If the exhibition has a catalog, and a viewer takes the catalog home and cuts out a small picture of one of the works from the catalog to stick on his desk, that might be considered fair use — as an artist, I’d rather they bought a full-size print from me, but hey, I can’t really bitch too loudly about their cutting up their souvenir instead … at least not without starting to sound like the RIAA. Similarly, I won’t get too upset if somebody downloads/screencaps one of my photos to stick on their laptop because they like looking at it.
But if a viewer takes a catalog, cuts out the catalog picture of my work, scans or photocopies that, and then markets a line of coffee mugs and mousepads with my image on them, never having asked my permission nor having paid me to license the image, yes, I’ll be upset about that. Unless, of course, I’d already decided that was okay and posted a sign saying, “I’m not trying to make a buck, just show off my work, go ahead and make copies”. And similarly again, if somebody grabs one of my images off the web, whether from Flickr or my personal web site or anywhere else, and uses it on their merchandise or in an ad campaign, without obtaining my permission first, I’ll be rightly ticked off. Unless, of course, I’d posted it with a Creative Commons (or similar) license giving them permission ahead of time to do what they were going to do.
Now if somebody is truly determined, they’re going to sneak a camera past the door guard and copy my work as soon as nobody’s looking, or they’re going to copy it out of the catalog if the small version is all they need. I can’t physically stop them, only persue remedies in court afterward. (I can try to discourage them, and I can make it more difficult, but I can’t prevent them utterly.)
Telling me, “You know they can rip you off if you display your work, so why show it if you’re going to complain,” really isn’t a useful, helpful, or even very meaningful answer here.
Now the issue at hand is the complaint that Flickr — the gallery owner — has made it _easier_than_usual_ for visitors to copy our work … more importantly, if I’m understanding the article correctly, they’re not making it any harder to copy the all-rights-reserved works than to copy the some-rights-freel-given works. I do see room for debate as to how much of that is Flickr’s responsibility and how much rests solely on the shoulders of the folks taking the copies (though in any case I also understand the folks saying, “whether it’s the gallery’s moral or legal responsibility or not, their not trying makes them not the right gallery for me”) … but the whole, “It’s the Internet; give up and shut up,” meme is — in the context of this discussion — a bogon. It’s not helpful.
Should the gallery owner at least _try_ to enforce the “no making copies without the artist’s permission” rule by at least erecting a token barrier so that infringers can’t claim their actions were accidental or from ignorance? At the very least, they could eject the infringing visitors who’ve gotten caught (revoke their API access).
It _is_ a matter to bring up _elsewhen_ (as is the “can we find a more Internet-age-suitable business model?”, which is an interesting question), but not in the “oh just shut up already” manner in which it’s being used in some comments here.
@ Mike (134) I think you’ve misread large chunks of the thread. The general concern is that flickr’s various restriction settings for public photos can be [not always, but in the main] circumvented.
By the way, if you think that you can embed a flickr picture on any page you wish and claim that it’s entirely legal I think you’ll find that you’ve misread the situation. If you embed a picture you may not be making a copy of it, but you are still potentially misusing it by not respecting the licensing terms under which it was made available to view, and misuse is the core concern in this thread. If you embed a flickr photo of mine [all of which are all rights reserved] in a page with ads on it I would be perfectly within my rights to sue you for misuse, licensing fees etc..
@Dave: So I have yet to see an example where a private photo is accessible to someone who shouldn’t be able to see it. If someone can tell me how it happens, I’d be happy to listen. But I want hard proof that this isn’t all just a giant witch hunt first. It’s amazing everyone simply agrees that there is a problem without asking to see proof.
You can sue someone for anything you want. It might get thrown out, but as an American, you have the right to sue anyone for any reason. The court will decide if your case has merit, that’s the court’s job! It looks like Google was sued over this very thing. In comment 134 I referenced something I posted in comment 122, which I’ll paste down below.
Now I’m not a lawyer, but reading the summary of the 9th circuit’s ruling, you actually wouldn’t have much of a case. And while our judicial system is built on case law which can change over time, I highly doubt another court would reverse the 9th circuit’s ruling on this matter. Read it, and if you read something different from it, let me know. However when I read it, it seems pretty clear that embedding someone else’s image, even with all rights reserved, is NOT copyright infringement. Do you read it differently?
Please note, I’m only trying to be a voice of reason here. If someone can show me steps to access a flickr photo that is properly marked as private, I’d be happy to agree with everyone that flickr is not doing things properly and will help contact them to make sure they do it right. I have yet to see any proof there is a problem in the first place. And that proof or steps to repeat the flaw are what I’m after. All my experiments to try and link to a private photo have proved unsuccessful.
Here is my post from comment 122:
Quoted from “http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/linking-copyrighted-materialsâ€:
“Inline linking involves placing a line of HTML on your site that so that your webpage displays content directly from another site. We now commonly refer to this practice as embedding. For example, many bloggers embed videos from YouTube on their blogs to illustrate a point or initiate discussion. While there is some uncertainty on this point, a recent case from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that inline linking does not directly infringe copyright because no copy is made on the site providing the link; the link is just HTML code pointing to the image or other material. See Perfect 10, Inc. v. Google, Inc., 508 F.3d 1146 (2007).â€
Yes. How DARE Flickr decide to steal images?! I do not believe this is what the founders intended, or thought would happen when they sold to yahoo. Now, getty is partnering with flickr! Seems the photo sharks never will be full!
Oh I also missed where you said, “a page with ads on it”.
It depends on how the person using your photo used it. Did they give a critique of the photo? Then go ahead, take him to court and watch yourself lose and get hit with court costs. The “fair use doctrine, codified by the Copyright Act of 1976 as 17 U.S.C. § 107, permits some copying and distribution without permission of the copyright holder or payment to same.” Critiques and reviews, are considered fair use.
So this person would be protected by case law in the perfect 10 ruling I mentioned above, and then AGAIN by fair use law if they provided an honest review, commentary, or critique of your photo. It’d have to be a real critique, and not someone saying “Uhm, it’s a good photo.” You’d have to prove they embedded your photo on their web page for the explicit purpose of profiting from your work AND that their critique/review is not genuine.
At least, that’s the way the fair use laws and relevant case law reads to me. But I love a good debate, so if you can show me case law or US code that differs, I’m open to hearing it.
I went to Flickr’s disussion forum to search the ‘watermark’
issue. And what I found out, (and as many of you already know,)some members want Flickr to install a watermarking tool
while others are dead set against it thinking that a
watermark on an image would be an eyesore. There is a
forum regular there who goes by the name of ‘Coleen’.
(Colleen?) Coleen gives out a ton of advice. It appears
as if Coleen is a Flickr rep. In one of Coleen’s posts,
Coleen said, “What’s the point of watermarking an
image? Even if a watermark is placed in the dead
center of said image, I or anyone else could easily
remove the watermark. It only takes 10 minutes to
remove it.” 10 minutes? Wow. And then I went to
Getty’s sight and I see where they use a watermark
as a security measure. I guess the Getty people feel
good about using watermarks.
BTW, I’m not all that familiar with Getty. I saw it
mentioned a few times here and there and I got
the feeling that they were the Rolls Royce of
stock photos. So I went to their site and I saw
a lot of great photos. But I also saw a lot of
boring, lackluster, run of the mill snapshots.
I guess I was wrong about the Rolls Royce analogy?
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