
Fight Over Yahoo’s Use of Flickr Photos - alxndr
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/fight-over-flickrs-use-of-photos-1416875564-lMyQjAxMTA0OTIwNDkyODQwWj
======
ChuckMcM
_“It ticked me off that somebody else is selling them when I was giving them
away,”_

This is a really common. A person creates something and "licenses it freely"
out of their own generosity, and then someone goes and profits from it.

It illustrates a very deep conflict that has existed, presumably since artists
existed, but really came to the fore in the age of silicon. The first example
I saw sort of "first hand" was Ward Christensen's XMODEM, which he made public
domain, was being sold to the US Government by a contractor who was using it
in their product.

The legal question is pretty clear, you license it such that others can
legally profit from it and there isn't an issue from the point of view of the
law.

But what is the moral question? I've asked people in this situation (having
their free stuff resold) and they split almost 50/50 on the moral one, which
is half say "If they are making a profit they should share it with me." and
half land in the "Good for them, but if they ask for support I'm going to
charge quintuple my normal rate."

Clearly a lot of issues can be avoided by being courteous, but it really does
provide something of a litmus test of people's true feelings with respect to
open source.

~~~
Swizec
That's why creative commons share-alike exists. [1] Basically, you can use
this freely as long as it's not for commercial purposes, and if you remix it
in any way, then the result must be shared under the same license.

It solves the dilemma pretty well I think.

[1] [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-
sa/3.0/](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

~~~
twelvechairs
Often its an issue of magnitude though. If someone wants to use a photo I've
taken very small in the corner of a 200 page document, which forms part of a
piece of work they have been paid by the government to do, its probably not
objectionable. If someone however sells my software slightly tweaked and
rebranded, its probably not OK.

There's a range of greys in there but the licencing is black and white.

~~~
icebraining
Generic licenses like these _should_ be black and white, otherwise you'd get
even more expectations mismatches.

Thankfully, nothing forces you to use only a single license for your work! The
best system for those grey cases, in my opinion, would be to publish the work
under a NC license, but then add a message like "contact me if you want to use
this work commercially" and offer specific licenses for such uses.

------
declan
It's important to read Creative Commons licenses carefully: some grant other
people the right to make money off of your original work in ways you never
envisioned, without any compensation to you.

Photographer Thomas Hawk wrote, correctly: "If you are going to license your
photos Creative Commons with no restriction, then you ought to be prepared for
this type of use. If it’s not Flickr selling them, anyone else can, legally.
If you are uncomfortable with this idea, then you should not use Creative
Commons without any sort of restriction."[1]

The photographers who are now upset apparently never read those licenses. And
they're irrevocable, according to Creative Commons itself[2], meaning there's
no legal recourse if someone wants to sell coffee mugs or T-Shirts with your
CC-BY or CC-BY-SA-licensed photos. To Yahoo's credit, they are voluntarily
allowing photographers to opt-out.

(What's interesting is that of the 14 photographers interviewed by the WSJ in
the linked article, 8 actually didn't care. I would have guessed that number
would have been higher.)

This is a separate issue from the "handpicked" Flickr photos, with a 51%
revenue split. The actual Yahoo announcement[3] says the handpicked rev-share
option is "invite-only," so presumably photographers who opt-in are okay with
the terms.

Legality aside, I suspect Yahoo will regret this move. Seems to me that the
negatives outweigh the revenue (especially since anyone can also offer CC
prints), and users may view it as at odds with Flickr's 2011 claim that "at
Flickr, your photos are always yours." Also Google+ has better editing tools
and free unlimited photo storage (for <=2048px, I think), so that might prompt
folks to move their photos over.

[1] [http://thomashawk.com/2014/11/the-controversy-around-
flickr-...](http://thomashawk.com/2014/11/the-controversy-around-flickr-
selling-creative-commons-licensed-photos.html)

[2]
[http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/10296](http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/10296)

[3] [https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-
us/72157649323144986/pa...](https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-
us/72157649323144986/page2/)

------
hardwaresofton
Crash course in licenses for a lot of people, I don't know if Yahoo should be
blamed for using licenses correctly.

Though it seems kind of under-handed that they're going to essentially
forcefully profit from their own users. Why not give them 50% just out of good
will? I would be very surprised to find out that Yahoo is depending on 100% of
the cash they're getting from the sale of these photos (I'd imagine they have
more lucrative pursuits)...

Also, this is probably an opportunity to create a site that caters to flicker
users and allows them to sell their prints to people. And if you take only a
small cut of the profit (let's say 10%) for access to the printing resources,
you can make a lot of money.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I intentionally chose to make my pics available for commercial use. As long as
I get attribution I don't really care. A reasonable number of them have been
used for various purposes and that makes me happy. (I have a pic on a sign in
a state park, which is neat!)

That said, I'm a little annoyed that the company hosting the images is now
actively trying to making money on them. It's not what I imagined. It doesn't
bother me enough to complain about it, but it does change my perception of the
"deal" I have with Flickr.

~~~
hardwaresofton
Yeah, it's definitely chafing people the wrong way (to say the least), I'm
just surprised Yahoo would think that was fine, to do to the people who keep
their site alive.

If I had my stuff on flickr with that license, I probably wouldn't care
either, but still it's bad PR they definitely don't need

------
fermigier
I remember, about 20 years ago, when some people started making and selling
Linux CDs (Walnut Creek or some others). Some people on the Linux mailing list
(or newsgroup, my recollection is only approximate) were upset that some
people were making money with their work (or with other people works, here
again my recollection is approximate).

Then Linus said: that's fine. And then, over the years, a billion dollar
industry emerged.

Except for the fact that I don't expect a billion dollar photo printing
industry to emerge from the CC-licensed pictures hosted by yahoo, 500px and
others, I think we have a similar situation here.

Maybe if Lawrence Lessig wrote something about the situation, this would help
a bit, though I don't think Lessig has the same aura over the amateur
photographers (after all, he is only the guy who wrote the license) than Linus
over the kernel afficionados.

------
spullara
Flickr gives anyone the ability to bulk change the license on their images to
one that doesn't include commercial use. Just go to this page:

[https://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/license/?from=privacy](https://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/license/?from=privacy)

Clearly the users that are upset didn't really understand the license that
they chose.

~~~
rsingel
Sure, but once you've licensed the images under a certain CC license, you
can't really go back. Yahoo will probably obey the user choice (as I think
they should) but legally aren't under any obligation to do so.

~~~
junto
I'm not sure. The user owns the content. If they decide to change the license
then Yahoo has to pull those photos from the pool.

~~~
icebraining
Nope. That's the "irrevocable" part of the CC licenses (as well as in most
FOSS licenses).

------
0x0
I thought you had to explicitly pick a license when uploading to flickr, I
guess the photographers in this article must have randomly clicked on a non-NC
CC license without understanding their actions? It's not like this is hidden
away in some 100 page T&C?

~~~
ramses0
Stupidity. Licenses are hard to understand in general, but they almost
certainly said "Creative Commons, Commercial Use, Attribution"

And then when somebody comes along and takes them up exactly on that offer and
they get offended: "That's not what I meant... I didn't know somebody would
actually do it... Gosh golly, those evil corporations are doing exactly what I
told them they could do... It's not right! This is what's wrong with America!"

I think it would have been good/better to reach out to people, give them a
chance to opt-out if they weren't cool with it, but it could be nice to view
flickr as not just images on the screen but potentially images on the wall too
because there is some really nice stuff out there.

------
hvs
If you don't want someone using your photos for commercial use, choose a
license that says that. I was expecting an article where Yahoo was using these
photos without permission (ala Facebook advertising) but this is just a case
of someone who didn't read the license details when she posted the photos to
the Creative Commons album.

------
jasonlotito
tl;dr: People who gave permission to use photos in certain ways upset that
others use photos in those ways.

------
junto
I don't understand the CC options offered by Flickr. I personally don't see
any Commercial options. Here are the options I see:

\- None (All rights reserved)

\- Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons (my default option)

\- Attribution-NonCommercial Creative Commons

\- Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons

\- Attribution Creative Commons

\- Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons

\- Attribution-NoDerivs Creative Commons

\- Attribution-NonCommercial Creative Commons

Which one is the commercial one?

BTW: You can reset the license on your entire photostream by doing a batch
reset:
[https://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/license/batch/](https://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/license/batch/)

~~~
guelo
It's the ones that don't say NonCommercial.

And I think that's the real problem, they're poorly named. They should
explicitly say Commercial.

Creative Commons made an ideological decision to make Commercial licenses the
default, and they promote them as "Free Cultural Works" to make them sound
more appealing.

~~~
icebraining
_Creative Commons made an ideological decision to make Commercial licenses the
default_

Of course they did. They also made an ideological decision in creating the
licenses in the first place. This connotation of "ideological" with "bad" is
obnoxious.

 _they promote them as "Free Cultural Works" to make them sound more
appealing._

Yeah, just like people say "free speech" even though you often have to pay to
get your speech across.

Or maybe it's not about money at all.

But I'm sure you were just unaware of that. It's not like HN talks about it
every other month.

------
shawn-furyan
I think it's absolutely appropriate for people to complain about free riders
on CC licenses. It's pretty clear that most people who use CC licenses mean to
promote creative reuse of their works by the broader creative community. An
implicit, if not legally mandated, requirement for reuse in many cases is that
you add something to the work.

Clearly, just selling prints en mass is mechanical enough that it fails to
meet many people's personal threshold for what constitutes a creative
addition. But practically speaking, it's impossible to add a legal definition
of "creative addition" without just creating an explicit list of creative
augmentations. Such a formulation would necessarily defeat any novel creative
forms, and so such a formulation is antithetical to the ideals behind Creative
Commons. So, enforcement must be relegated to the realm of social norms.

That's what's going on here. Creators are saying Yahoo are being jerks for
using using their works in a way that meet the letter of the license, but not
the spirit.

~~~
Flimm
I think many free content creators would disagree with you on what the spirit
of cc-by is.

~~~
shawn-furyan
Hmm... that very well may be, and it even strikes me as probable. The
nebulousness of the expectations regarding what CC means, and should mean is
central to this entire episode. Part of the reason that CC exists is that
copyright makes it difficult to share your work without either just giving it
completely away, or striking explicit deals on an ad hoc basis. CC was a
partial solution, but it's not really high resolution enough to satisfy
everyone's needs and/or expectations in such dynamic and diverse areas as the
pursuits of art.

That's why I say that social norm is an appropriate companion to CC here,
because the formation of social norms allow for nuance that one size fits most
CC licensing really doesn't.

Further, independent artists are typically going to be at a large disadvantage
when trying to enforce licenses against large institutions, so to the extent
that it is used by small independents, it's in many ways a system that relies
on generally charitable intentions all around. I'm sure there are examples of
independents taking on larger organizations, but I suspect that if it becomes
clear that the only way to get what you want out of a CC license is to adopt a
litigious stance, then it's adoption would decline pretty dramatically.

------
gameshot911
Props to the article author for including the opinions of some photographers
who were fine with Yahoo's usage of their pictures. It would have been very
easy to create a hit piece which only included quotes from people who were
offended by the operation.

------
mullingitover
I wonder what's stopping anyone from slurping up all Flickr's CC-licensed
photos and beating Yahoo at their own game. Certainly not copyright law.

------
RexRollman
What is the opposite of the Midas Touch? Whatever it is, Yahoo has it, at
least with the things it has purchased.

~~~
eCa
Judas kiss.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_of_Judas](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_of_Judas)

------
general_failure
This should be a reminder to many that 'there is no such thing as a free
lunch'.

~~~
freedombeer
...only free beer

