How Every Flickr Photo Ended Up on Sale This Weekend

Being a frequent, hours/per/day internet user I learned something a long time ago. If you don’t want something of yours to be used or abused, don’t upload it to the internet.

I read your post. It may be your opinion that the API violates your individual TOS…however that’s just what it is…an opinion. And you know what they say about opinions…they’re like @$$holes…everyone has one and they’re all full of crap.

Now, a fact about this is that the photo distributed through the API is not being hosted ANYWHERE else but on Flickr’s servers. Not a legal violation of TOS OR Copyright.

If you really still think you have a legal leg to stand on, sue them. Put your money where your mouth is.

But, what it boils down to is this: Don’t like it, don’t use it.

If this was a camera store, and you didn’t like the way they did business, why would you still be a patron of that store?

You don’t like the way Flickr does business. Why do you still use Flickr? This confuses me.

It’s a matter of logic, Jim. Not principle.

Is there any way of tracing ones photos ?
i.e. if any of my photos have been taken from the flickr site and used for any other purpose, how can I tell ?

Hasn’t every download got a unique reference number that is attached to the file , like every PC adress, that is traceable ?

Secretly I’d be rather pleased if I found out that a photo of mine was deemed good enough to be used in mass production. But I’d want some sort of recompense if somebody else was making money out of my work. But how do I find out ?

I’m an engineer not a computer or copyright lawyer so forgive me if my questions are niaive.

Thank you for the link JUAG! It’s nice to have some clarity on what exactly happened! I still don’t like that Flickr allows the right click/copy feature to work. SmugMug doesn’t, as a few other photo sites don’t either! Why can’t Flickr disable that ability & have a alert as SmugMug does … “THESE PHOTOS ARE COPYRIGHTED BY THEIR RESPECTIVE OWNERS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. UNAUTHORIZED USE PROHIBITED!” Sure one could still do a Screen Print, but shouldn’t Flickr do ALL that it can towards assisting it’s customers! I’m sick & tired over fighting these Orkut brats stealing my photos by right click/copy!

Thanks for the advice … it already is! Unless it’s NOT working? That still doesn’t eliminate the possibility for one to right click/copy.

Thank you Dave for your opinion … I’m sure it’s based on your own personal experience, but I have experienced differently, for I can right click/copy on ANY photo whether my contact or not! So let’s try this … go ahead & give one of my photos a right click/copy & see what happens!

Well Dave, I find that just ODD! Since our last exchange, I asked a few others to do the same … some were contacts, some not, & they all were ALL able to SAVE PICTURE AS, just as I am on any photo I see in Flickr. Right click/copy doesn’t appear in OUR cases to have thing to do with PRIVACY … it seems it’s a given … anyone but you are able to. Hmmm ….

Joy, go ahead and save the picture. Then look at it. You’ll save the spaceball.gif transparent layer that protects the image. But, as Sean McGee and others have put it, all protection schemes are extremely easy to circumvent by someone willing.

Joy Elizabeth

I could not agree with you more. I work for a photo website (www.photrade.com) and we discovered this need and have been working to build a site to help photographers share, protect and make money from their photos. We are working on creating innovative technologies that will help keep your photos safe. To date we have launched custom watermarking (automatic – you set the watermark up once) and we disable right-clicking (you get a blank image). We will be releasing an entire protection suite over the next few months – this is only the first step.

We believe that you should be able to share your photos on your terms, so we also allow you to sell digital rights and prints of your image. Our goal is to give image users a simple solution to purchase images and generate awareness around image theft.

We are currently in a closed beta – if any of you are interested in checking us out send me an email (krista at photrade dot com) and I would be happy to send you an invite for our site.

We would love to hear your feedback on how we can create a photo site that would really meet your needs.

– Krista (VP Marketing, Photrade)

@Krista Neber — you are a little too proud of the way you have “disabled” right-click. Admittedly it will stop some people. It took me about 5 seconds to figure out what you had done and download a picture from your website. Keep trying. You are doing the same thing Smugmug does. I thought they were going to be smarter but apparently not.

@Joy — “right-click” is built into the browser. Reality is that if it shows up on a screen it can be copied. Get over it.

To others in general — The biggest travesty about this is that as an API developer I should not have to make sure that I enforce Flickr’s contract with YOU. I expect Flickr to do their job and filter from my application any images that my application should not access.

@Tupart — It is really pretty easy. Any number of developer tools available for Firefox and IE let you see the image. Basically what Smugmug did was make the image a “background image”. Pretty weak protection — if anyone was counting on that .. forget it.

There’s an old saying (well, old by Internet standards) that technical solutions aren’t very for solving social problems.

Copyright matters, I think (there are folks who disagree).

As others have pointed out (though I get the impression that not everyone is quite understanding the message), if a user can see an image, then they _have_ the image and they can copy the image. (If nothing else, they can pluck it out of their browser’s cache.) As I’ve pointed out (at least I meant to), no security, including Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), is bulletproof; so even if you try to force users to view your photos in a plug-in you supply that enforces DRM, as long as they have control over their own computers, someone will be able to break it.

So here’s why I don’t worry about disabling right-click: it only really inconveniences the folks who want to do ‘fair use’ stuff with my photos anyhow. Anybody else is either never going to try to right-click-save in the first place, or is going to be more motivated than the casual fair-use user, and will work around anti-right-click measures as a matter of _routine_. I won’t say that disabling right-click lacks any value at all; I can see a naive user running into it and perceiving it as a _reminder_ that folks care about copyright, so it might stop some abuses-through-ignorance (or lack-of-care), even though it will barely even slow down anyone who actually intends to infringe. Personally, crippling right-click isn’t high on my list of priorities.

(For the folks who do care a lot about that, accept that you’re not going to be able to stop anybody, but you might make a few people slow down enough to think, “Oh, the artist doesn’t want me to do that,” and maybe consider the reasons for that.)

Similarly, I cannot see a way for Flickr to absolutely enforce license restrictions on photos made accessible via their API, except by making any rights-restricted images completely invisible via the API. Anyone who wants the image badly enough will either break whatever safeguards Flickr imposes or resort to screen-scraping.

What I _do_ see that Flickr should be doing, is making it _as_easy_as_possible_to_comply_ with license terms, and maybe a bit harder for their API users to screw up through ‘mere’ inattention. (Scare quotes because unlike someone who simply doesn’t know better, lack of attention to license terms by someone who does know better but just doesn’t care is a bit more sinister.)

Is there a way to tell the API, “Only give me images with licenses that include these privileges”? (It looks like there is on the flickr.photos.search call, as an optional parameter — is that how most API users retrieve photos?) On retieval calls where there isn’t, there should be; if it’s already there, perhaps the default can be changed so that an extra step is required to grab images not already CC-licensed?

As always, a balance will need to be struck between security and ease of use. Unfortunately, whether the balance one picxs is ‘correct’ is not always obvious. Making the default acceptable license list on an API request be some subest of CC licenses instead of “any”, and making developers fill in that parameter to get non-CC or CC-noncommercial images would, IMNSHO, go a long way toward that. (If nothing else, it would take away the “I didn’t realize I was snarfing up non-free images as well,” and “I can’t help it, the API gives me everything” excuses! Filling in that argument would make the request for rights-reserved images explicit; no ignorance excuse.)

But ultimately, even after we badger Flickr into making it harder to do the wrong thing accidentally, convincing users that the safeguards are there as reminders and to keep them from doing something they shouldn’t want to do, rather than mere annoyances to learn ways around and then ignore, is a social problem more than a technical one. So … educate, at every reasonable opportunity.

It’s so laughable they even call it a ‘pro’ account!!! That’s it. Flickr’s over for me too and I don’t think I’ll be re-newing my ‘pro’ account. Thanks for posting this.

As a programmer, I can promise you that it IS 100% possible to alter the Flickr API so that it CANNOT ever be possible to take images that were on the site marked as copyright protected – they could close that hole so easily it’s not even funny by just making sure the API, no matter how it is called, always excludes those types of images.

But instead, Flickr makes it a ‘choice’ for the adopting 3rd party programmer to have to ‘know’ to ‘decide’ and code in the logic to check to see if a photo is copywritten before it scoops it up – if they don’t do that, it gets everything. If this is the case, then that is just plain illegal since Flickr is NOT honoring their promise that they ‘claim’ to give us as a service which we paid for when we set up our privacy settings (eg I set mine to NOT make my photos searchable by the API — I didn’t think this choice was actually left up to the website who IMPLEMENTED the API to ‘understand’ and code and that their API was wide open – I thought that Flickr would not even allow this OPTION to gather photos so-marked on their API at all!)

It is just plain copyright theft by Flickr programmers, to be honest – they should not make photos available via their public API when photographers on their site have CLEARLY marked those as ‘off limits’.

I don’t want to make my photos private to accomplish this task – what is the point of being on a photo sharing website where one of the best things about it is the ability to get commentary on your photography if you do that? That was not the Flickr promise.

Certainly I want individual people esp Flickr members to see my photos and to comment or to ask me if they would like a copy for their own use. But I certainly don’t want them available for mass downloads by pirating websites and I don’t want them ‘API retrievable’ and — any idiot – even an idiot working for Yahoo – KNOWS this by the way I set my Flickr privacy and copyright settings that THEY designed to ‘assure me’ that my wishes would be respected ‘to the best of their abilities’ — then they go out and design an API that BLATENTLY ignores those precepts which THEY set up on their own website.

They have made this API illegally open ON PURPOSE and I belive this is negligent at best, criminal conspiracy at worst – was Flickr conspiring with 3rd party site developers to further profit from the photographers who pay to use their site via sales of their API keys? Racketeering charges anyone ? Where is a good fly by night out for a buck class action lawsuit attorney when you need one? Where are the Flickr insiders to send some journalist a few juicy internal memos to blow this whole thing wide open?

Good bye flickrHOO!

‘view source’ on the stashy page provides a link to the original flickr page.

The fact that stashy stores copies of ‘all rights reserved’ images that were posted to flickr on their servers looks like pretty blatant infringement. Someone does appear to be systematically harvesting images from Explore.

Flickr’s response to some reported concerns [e.g. http://www.flickr.com/groups/strobist/discuss/72157606181773688/?search=stashy%5D is not particularly helpful.

Great how Flickr makes a site that volumises the way pics can be hoovered up and re-distributed, waves some illusion of privacy and permissions in front of you when you join [so that the onus is on you to protect yourself] and then calmly backs away from every infringement that occurs, despite the fact that it is misuse of either the API or RSS feeds from their site that is causing most of the infringements.

Stashy took themselves off the web. a visit to stashy.com gives this message:
Hi folks, it’s time to say goodbye.

Yesterday (16.07.2008) we understood that there are some images posted on the site without the owners’ permission. So we removed them immediately. And then we started thinking how many other copyrighted images might have been posted on the site. Stashy is a community powered site and our small team of two students cannot control and support it 24/7. We created Stashy to bring joy and fun to the people, not to deal with guys that post copyrighted stuff. And since the site started to fail in its mission and we do not have any profit from it, we decided to shut it down.

We apologize to the real owners of the copyrighted images. Please don’t hate Stashy, hate their posters.

To all Stashy fans and users: we want to say that we are sorry that we are shutting down our baby. We love you guys!!!

Have fun and enjoy the summer 🙂

The Stashy Team

Right click is moot. Forget the api. Upload only small, low res photos. Everything is stealable even if permissions are set for only you to download.

A simple knowledge of html is all that is required.. view the html source… search for the term… jpg and one them will be your photo… copy and paste into the browser the prefix before it.. voila..
I stopped posting anything other than small 4 inch wide photos on Flickr for that reason…

Don’t kid yourself.. if it is on the net.. it is there for the taking. Play it safe if you value your work

@ pds – By your quote “I’m tired of people complaining copyright infringement just because we carry FlickR xml feeds on our site.” am I to understand that you are representing FlickR with your comment? Hmmm .. perhaps it’s just me, but you came of very unprofessional without concern for the people who send you home a paycheck … US!

Dave is right…just because you upload a photo to a photo sharing site does not mean you forfeit any copyright you may want to claim. However, it does mean that you shouldn’t be surprised when you find your photos elsewhere on the net.

(I am shocked, shocked to find my photos on the internet!)

Now, as to the issue of carrying feeds on a website or not, here are some facts. Even though a website may display the pictures, and even though that website’s visitors might be able to download those pictures, if the photos are never hosted on the website in question, and stay on flickr’s servers, there is no copyright violation by anyone but the users of the site…not the site itself.

Now, if the site uses the RSS feeds to download Flickr images to the site’s individual servers, of course this would be wrong and a legitimate copyright violation claim.

Should Flickr police copyright issues related to abuses of it’s API? It’s a good question. But, I believe it is the responsibility of the copyright holder to either police it him or herself, or appoint a representative to do so.

In an ideal virtual world, you could go to a website, type in the file name, and find every place your files have been illegally copied to. But this isn’t an ideal world, virtual or not.

You’ve heard the saying, every cloud has a silver lining? Well, I say, finding a silver lining doesn’t mean there’s not going to be a storm. Flickr’s a great website for what it is. But there are negatives to using it.

If those negatives are bothersome enough to cause you to feel outrage, then why continue using something that causes those feelings within you? It would be illogical to do so. Just ask Spock.