Juha Ylitalo

I don’t know whether its Flickr’s large userbase and/or huge collection of images, but somehow Flickr always seem to be part of news, when someones photos are being used without proper license or in some other fishy way in media. News about how Virgin Mobile’s latest ad campaign in Australia are probably old news from many Flickr users, but now it can even be viewed at CNN.
One common (even though not mandatory) phenomen to these news about questionable use of Flickr’s images is that disputed photos have been licensed under Creative Commons license. There are at least six flavors of Creative Commons’ license with different rules regarding attribution, use of image and what you can do to the image. Regardless on what rights photographer was willing to give out, Virgin Mobile hadn’t bothered to check for Model Release from the girl in picture.
Even if we can ignore license issues on Virgin Mobile’s case, Creative Commons license has at least one problematic issue. How do we define what is commercial use and what is not. If you have personnel website with ads, is your site commercial? What about website for non-profit organization that has ads on its pages, is it commercial website?
These situations often come up, when new “non-profit” website want to use images from Flickr to make it look pretty and Google Ads to create revenue. Some of these sites might not even bother to check what the license each individual images has, while others might do it, but have their own definition for what is commercial use and what is not. There have been many debates about what is commercial and what is not, but we are still missing clear ruling on where the line is drawn. Even if their would be concensus on what it should be, is their way to write it down so that it means same thing all over the world, since every country has their own legal definitions for these things.
If you are using Flickr and want to play safe, Flickr has tools that you can use to protect your privacy, but you have to turn them on before you start uploading images. You can set your default license to be ‘All rights reserved’ instead of something more liberal. You can also define, whether you want your images to show up when some performs searches in Flickr through Flickr’s website and/or 3rd party tools.
While these things should make use of Flickr to be pretty safe, I’ve got tired of cases, where images form Flickr have been misused somewhere and I’ve decided to keep my images in ylitalot.net instead of trying to keep my photos in two places at the sametime. For those, who really want to follow my “photostream”, you can do it quite easily by monitoring my RSS feed in your favorite RSS reader. If your not familiar with RSS feeds, commoncraft.com has excellent video called RSS in plain english that will give good overview about how it can change the way, how you keep track of things.

Articles that I found afterwards:

• The Register: Creative Commons sued for deception