Flickr Now Officially Supports Public Domain Dedications

from the very-nice-to-see dept

As we had noted in our story about Elon Musk declaring all SpaceX photos public domain, Flickr (where most of those photos were hosted) did not allow an official public domain dedication. And while it offered Creative Commons licenses, the CC0 public domain dedication was not among the options. Flickr is not the only site like that -- many sites that offer CC licensing don't include a CC0 option. Last week, there was an interesting piece by Jessamyn West exploring why it was that Flickr chose not to offer a public domain option. She found an old forum post by Flickr founder (and now Slack founder/CEO) Stewart Butterfield, where he explained the reasoning as such:

The reasons we don’t have a PD option: (i) Unlike CC licenses, you can’t take PD back — once it is done, it is done. I spec’d out a three stage confirmation (including typing out that you understand what it means) but this was seemed like too much and we didn’t want the support hassle. People are free to use the description field to specify their PD desires. (ii) There are liabilities that we don’t want to take on if we allow people to claim something is public domain without actual checking the chain of title — if they don’t own it in the first place, we can get in trouble. (This is also true of CC images, but at least that can be changed after the fact and there is less of a chance of the image just “escaping” in the wild.)

Of course, those reasons really don't make that much sense in reality. You can't really take back CC licenses either. The very first thing that Creative Commons tells potential licensors is that the licenses are not revocable. Once you grant a CC license, it stays that way.

Thankfully, the Yahoo folks who are currently running Flickr realized that this was an opportunity -- and have now announced that it has added both "public domain" listings and a CC0 dedication as options when uploading images:

We’ve been proud to support Creative Commons licenses since 2004, and we’ve become an important repository of U.S. Government works and historic images from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums around the world (check out The Flickr Commons for examples).

But we’ve heard from our community that we’re missing two important designations: Public Domain and Creative Commons 0 (CC0). Many members of our community want to be able to upload images that are no longer protected by copyright and correctly tag them as being in the Public Domain, or they want to release their copyright entirely under CC0.

So, starting today we’re happy to support these two new options. One of the first accounts on Flickr to change its designation was SpaceX, which has uploaded more than a hundred gorgeous images of its launches. These extraordinary photos are now available for others to freely use, enhance, and promulgate without restriction under copyright law.

This is a great move -- and we're thrilled to see Flickr take such a stand (even if it should have happened years ago). Hopefully other platforms will follow suit.

Filed Under: cc0, copyright, flickr, hosting services, licensing, photos, public domain
Companies: flickr, spacex, yahoo

Flickr Plans To Sell Creative Commons Photos And That's Okay...

from the permissionless-culture-is-okay dept

There appear to be a lot of people up in arms over Flickr's announced plans to sell wall art prints of various Creative Commons-licensed images on the site. The uproar is mostly because people who chose a license like Creative Commons' attribution license, and not a "non-commercial" license are not going to see any money from any images that Flickr (owned by Yahoo) sells. And that leads to angry posts like this one arguing that selling the work is "cheesy, desperate and not at all fine with me."

Except... the license that was chosen says that, yes, this is fine with you. This doesn't necessarily mean that Flickr/Yahoo's decision was smart. The way it's being done appears to be upsetting lots of people, and upsetting the core people who make your service work is -- generally speaking -- not smart. But this leads to a bigger issue, one that is highlighted nicely in a post on all of this by Tom Lee, in which he notes that part of open licensing is giving up control so that others can benefit. And this is a key point that is missed by many, unfortunately:

Open licensing is about giving up control so that other people can benefit. That’s all it will cost you: control. Having control feels nice. But you should ask yourself what it really gets you. And you should think about what others might gain if you were able to let go.

Furthermore, he notes that what Flickr is doing here really will benefit lots of folks:

Flickr’s sale of prints does not deprive photographers of their work or money. Users have the same ability to use their work that they always had. The vast majority would never have taken the steps necessary to profit from their work, so print sales do not deprive them of money. When a user really expects to sell prints, they should avoid Creative Commons licensing, which, as I’ve mentioned, is easily done.

Flickr’s sale of prints provides benefits to other people. People who work for and own Flickr make money. The vendors producing and delivering the prints make money. And people who buy prints get to enjoy works of art.

Parker Higgins posted some further thoughts on Twitter that are worth noting as well. Many of the people who are upset about this are angry that Yahoo didn't ask them about this first. But as Higgins notes, that's just bringing back the idea of permission-based culture, rather than recognizing that a big part of the value of Creative Commons (or any other such open license system or public domain) is getting beyond permission culture and recognizing that in giving up control, there are lots of benefits.

Free culture licenses aren't supposed to flag that you're a cooperative player in permissions culture. They're supposed to do the opposite.

— Parker Higgins (@xor) December 1, 2014

Now, one could make a reasonable cultural argument that Yahoo/Flickr should have approached this situation with more caution -- recognizing how some people would likely respond to this, no matter how reasonable or legal it is. If I were in charge of the program at Yahoo, that likely would have been my approach. But, the troubling end result of this is that it may just lead more people to slap a "non-commercial" license on their Creative Commons works, greatly limiting the kinds of benefits that are out there, without providing any real benefit to themselves. In some ways, this gets to the heart of the problems we've noted with Creative Commons in the past -- especially the fact that many incorrectly assume that all CC-licensed material is only for non-commercial use. It's also why we think there's a strong argument that Creative Commons should either drop or totally rebrand the non-commercial offering, so that this branding confusion is dealt with. The anger in this situation is just a rehash of that branding confusion -- and the end result is that it reinforces this idea of "permissions" culture, rather than highlighting the benefits of sharing culture without first needing permission -- even if for commercial reasons.

Filed Under: attribution, copyright, creative commons, flickr, non-commercial, photos, sales
Companies: flickr, yahoo

Awesomeness: Millions Of Public Domain Images Being Put Online

from the go-use-them dept

Here's some nice news. Kalev Leetaru has been liberating a ton of public domain images from books and putting them all on Flickr. He's been going through Internet Archive scans of old, public domain books, isolating the images, and turning them into individual images. Because, while the books and images are all public domain, very few of the images have been separated from the books and released in a digital format.

To achieve his goal, Mr Leetaru wrote his own software to work around the way the books had originally been digitised.

The Internet Archive had used an optical character recognition (OCR) program to analyse each of its 600 million scanned pages in order to convert the image of each word into searchable text.

As part of the process, the software recognised which parts of a page were pictures in order to discard them.

Mr Leetaru's code used this information to go back to the original scans, extract the regions the OCR program had ignored, and then save each one as a separate file in the Jpeg picture format.

Already over 2.6 million images have been posted to Flickr in this manner -- all completely in the public domain. From a historical perspective, the images are fascinating -- and the fact that anyone can do anything with them, free of charge, is important culturally as well. Just scrolling through the images is amazing. Here are a few interesting ones that I spotted:



There seem to be lots of images of musical scores, sewing machines, individual portraits, building and machinery. Each Flickr page associated with the image gives information about the book, including the text before and after the image, which is pretty cool. The one (only slightly) annoying thing is that on the Flickr pages, rather than saying these are public domain images, it says that there are "no known copyright restrictions." While that's accurate, and a potentially reasonable hedge against some miraculous finding that says these images are covered by copyright, it's really too bad that it's so problematic to come out and say "this is in the public domain, do whatever the hell you want with it."

Filed Under: book scans, copyright, flickr, internet archive, kalev, leetaru, old books, public domain

New Program Makes It Even Easier To Hide & Access Information In Flickr Photos

from the ban-flickr! dept

The practice of hiding data in images -- known as steganography -- is nothing new. People have talked about it for ages, and we've long heard reports of how nefarious organizations used it all the time. But, of course, it can also be used for perfectly good reasons as well -- and now it may have just become a lot easier to use. Glyn Moody points us to the news of a new steganography program that is designed to work easily via Flickr, with the goal of getting news reports to various countries that try to censor the internet. The program, called Collage, supposed makes it quite easy to both encrypt and decrypt information in Flickr photos, knowing that Flickr -- unlike many news sites -- isn't often blocked in countries that censor the internet.

Of course, once word of this program gets out, that could possibly change, but the programmers behind it say they can easily expand it to work with other photo sharing sites as well.

None of this is that surprising, really. In fact, my first reaction on hearing it was to think that this can't be new, as I'm pretty sure other offerings have already allowed such functionality with Flickr. However, it is a nice reminder that every time you try to censor the internet, there will be ways through, and that includes just masking the traffic you want blocked as legitimate traffic, such as Flickr photos.

Filed Under: collage, easy, flickr, steganography

Flickr Obama/Joker Takedown Story Gets... Odd

from the so-what-happened? dept

We were a bit confused over the claim recently that Flickr (Yahoo) had taken down a Photoshopped image of Obama as "the Joker" superimposed on a Time Magazine cover. It didn't make much sense, because it wasn't clear who's copyright was even at issue. It didn't seem likely that Time Magazine would have any claim, even though that's what many assumed. So, some folks started asking around -- and all of the "obvious" candidates said no. Time Magazine, DC Comics and the original photographer who took the image on which the photo was based all insisted they didn't send the takedown. That resulted in some fingerpointing at Flickr, but some more digging by Thomas Hawk turned up a guy named Edward Przydzial (though Yahoo's takedown notification called him Przydzia, which resulted in even more confusion initially. But, no one seems to know who he is and what copyright he might hold in the matter, making the whole story quite bizarre. Hawk contacted Przydzial, who responded claiming that he created the image... but also that he doesn't own the image, and refused to say whether or not he filed the DMCA notice (and some bizarre stuff about needing a court order to find out who filed the DMCA notice). Once again, this highlights some of the inanities of the whole DMCA takedown process.

Filed Under: copyright, fair use, flickr, joker, obama
Companies: yahoo

Did Flickr Takedown Obama Joker Time Cover Over Copyright Infringement?

from the what-was-copied? dept

A bunch of folks have been sending in this story about Flickr supposedly taking down the "Obama Joker" Time Magazine cover that's been in the news lately, but I have to admit that I'm confused about the reasoning behind the takedown. There are questions of whether it's just "censorship," but I'm trying to figure out what's the actual copyright claim. The suggestion is that the concern is from Time Magazine, which doesn't like its brand associated with the falsified cover -- but wouldn't that be a trademark issue, rather than a copyright one? If there's any copyright issue at all, it would potentially (and then, weakly) be from whoever owns the rights to the original photo that was changed. But seeing as there's still an ongoing battle in the Shepard Fairey case to determine if that sort of thing is fair use and I haven't seen anyone identify the original Obama photo that was used here, it's not even clear who would be crying copyright infringement. So... where exactly is the copyright infringement here?

Filed Under: copyright, fair use, flickr, joker, obama
Companies: yahoo

Can You Re-Copyright Photos In The Public Domain?

from the not-good dept

Davis Freeberg wrote in to tell us about how a small publishing company, Summertown Sun, had issued takedown notices for public domain photographs that were put on Flickr. What appears to have happened is that a user, by the name of "Dazzlecat," posted some photos to Flickr that she believed were public domain photographs (vintage photographs from over a century ago). However, Summertown Sun sent a takedown claiming copyright ownership of those photos. That seems odd, since public domain is... public domain. Either way, Yahoo/Flickr obeyed the takedown notice and then also took down a followup altered image and blog post that trashed Summertown for the takedown, saying that it violated Flickr's terms of service. Yahoo is, of course, free to do what it wants -- and has the right to takedown whatever it feels violates its terms of service, but what's more interesting is the question of whether or not the images are in the public domain, and whether or not Summertown's takedown was actually legal.

In a response to the original complaint about the takedowns, Summertown tried to defend itself by claiming:

We claim copyright on images we have creatively altered, which includes hundreds in our collections; such alterations remove them from the public domain. In addition we offer all of our images under the terms of a license agreement, regardless of copyright status, which is common practice in the image industry in recognition of considerable expenditure of production work, money, and other resources in making our products available.

That seems troubling -- and not quite right to me. You can't "remove" something from the public domain (Congress can apparently, but that's another issue). You can alter a work and then copyright the alterations if they are significant changes. Minor tweaks and alterations are not copyrightable and certainly the underlying original image is still very much in the public domain. Now, looking over the Victorian photographs that Summertown offers, many of them do not seem to have major alterations at all. Some appear to be colorized, so perhaps (maybe?) they could claim that the colored part of the images are copyrighted, but even that might be a stretch.

Furthermore, the fact that Summertown engages in the "common practice" of putting forth a license, regardless of copyright status, is rather meaningless. If it's in the public domain, it's in the public domain. You can't pretend the public domain doesn't exist just because you add a license to something. If that were the case, there would be no public domain at all.

I've run this by a few copyright lawyers I know, and most agreed that Summertown's position seems tenuous, though it really does depend on what photos, specifically, were uploaded to Flickr. So, without knowing exactly which images were placed in the Flickr stream, it's not 100% clear that Summertown violated the DMCA with a false takedown (it's against the law to send a takedown if you don't actually own the copyright), but if the photo in question really did not have significant alterations, then it seems likely.

Filed Under: alterations, copyright, flickr, photographs, public domain
Companies: summertown sun, yahoo

The Library Of Congress Goes 2.0

from the welcome-to-the-digital-age dept

It's nice to see that there's some buzz around the announcement today from the Library of Congress that it has teamed up with Yahoo's Flickr to put public domain images online for everyone to see and comment on. That's exactly the sort of thing the Library of Congress should be doing. The Library of Congress has been working for a while on doing a better job digitizing its archives, and it's nice to see them looking for ways to take advantage of what's out there already, rather than trying to do everything internally. Part of the deal is that the LoC is encouraging people to tag and comment on the photos, hoping that it will provide additional information on some of the images that it has little information about. Mathew Ingram wonders how effective that type of "crowdsourced" effort will actually be. He's right, that it probably won't be all that useful, but it probably can't hurt either. However, what could be even more interesting was if they did something like the ESP Game to more accurately tag photos by making it into something of a game.

Filed Under: flickr, library of congress, public domain photos, tagging

Turns Out You Can't Sue Creative Commons Because You Didn't Understand The CC License

from the still-cost-$15k dept

A few months ago we wrote about a somewhat bizarre lawsuit where the family of a teenager sued Creative Commons after a photo of the girl was used in an ad campaign by Virgin Mobile Australia. The details were a bit strange, and it appeared that the family (and its lawyer) were a bit confused themselves, leading them to sue parties that were not responsible at all. What happened was that a youth group counselor had taken a photo of the girl and posted it to Flickr with a Attribution 2.0 license -- meaning that anyone could use it, even for commercial purposes, so long as they gave credit for who took the photo. Virgin Mobile Australia then went and used the photo and others (with attribution) in a poster campaign for its mobile phone service. The girl later discovered all this when someone in Australia spotted the ad campaign with the Flickr URLs on the poster, and thought it was interesting enough to take a photo of the ad and put that up on Flickr. Her family then felt that she was being taken advantage of and found a lawyer who sued Virgin Mobile Australia, Virgin Mobile USA and Creative Commons. It's a stretch to think that even Virgin Mobile Australia has done anything wrong here (it followed the terms of the CC license), but there is simply no rationale for suing Virgin Mobile USA (a totally unrelated company to VMA) or Creative Commons. After all, Creative Commons hadn't done anything here other than exist.

If anything, the family could sue the photographer for posting the girl's photo with a CC license without permission -- but, instead, the family included the photographer as a plaintiff in the lawsuit. So, basically, they were suing CC because the photographer didn't understand the license he had chosen and he felt he deserved some money for his own misunderstanding as well. Thankfully, the family and its lawyer seem to have finally (after the fact) taken the time to realize that Creative Commons and Virgin Mobile USA have nothing to do with this lawsuit and have withdrawn the suit on those two firms (I assume the case against Virgin Mobile Australia will still continue). Unfortunately, however, their inability to figure this out before the lawsuit ended up costing Creative Commons approximately $15,000.

Filed Under: creative commons, flickr
Companies: virgin mobile

Creative Commons (And Virgin) Sued For Teen's Photo Being Used In Ad Campaign

from the sue,-sue,-sue dept

Stack writes in to let us know that the family of a teenager in Texas has sued Creative Commons, Virgin Mobile Australia and Virgin Mobile USA because Virgin Mobile Australia happened to use a photo of the girl in an ad campaign in Australia. The photo had been taken by the girl's youth counselor, who posted it on Flickr, with a Creative Commons license saying the photo could be used with attribution (the ad apparently includes the Flickr URL, so it appears to be following the terms). There are some bizarre parts to the story. It's not clear why they're suing Creative Commons, since the photographer (who is apparently suing as well) chose the license in question. If he didn't want to have the photo used, he shouldn't have picked a CC license (or should have picked a more restrictive CC license). It's certainly ridiculous to then blame CC because the guy didn't know what kind of license he was choosing or how it could be used. In fact, the original photo is still using a CC Attribution 2.0 Generic license. You would think before suing the guy would have at least changed the license. It also doesn't make any sense that the family is suing Virgin Mobile USA. It's an entirely separate company from Virgin Mobile Australia. Also, the family says that they're quite upset because people can now "Google" their daughter. Yet, the ad doesn't have her name, and the photo was put online by the youth counselor, so it's not clear how they could be Googling the ad (and, of course, by suing, the family is only drawing a lot more attention to the ad). Finally, the family is complaining that this is defamatory and somehow insulting -- yet it's difficult to see how the ad can be construed as insulting. It's hard to see such a case getting very far -- though, it is interesting to see that Virgin Mobile was using CC Flickr photos in their ad campaign.

Filed Under: creative commons, flickr
Companies: virgin mobile, yahoo