Why Flickr still makes me uncomfortable
The Guardian has a report of the BBC using a photograph they found on flickr for commercial purposes, in contravention of the Creative Commons terms under which it was published. Given that it was only pure conincidence that the photographer noticed this particular breach, it makes you wonder how often this sort of thing happens. Flickr is all well and good as a ready-made gallery site, but if you use it to store full resolution copies of your photographs, then no matter how restrictive a licence you apply to them, it would be very difficult to prevent unscrupulous or, to give the BBC the benefit of the doubt, careless use of the photographs for purposes specifically excluded by the CC or copyright terms, unless you make sure that you only allow friends and/or family to download the originals.
Tags: BBC, copyright, creative commons, flickr, licensing
February 18th, 2009 at 11:38 am
is also a concern of mine, and it’s why I plan on placing a visible watermark on all my images, it’s just getting around to actually doing it.
March 16th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Having just become a Flickr convert, I’ve taken the pragmatic approach — if it’s on the internet, someone will steal it no matter what you try to do to prevent it.
For this reason, I never upload full res images, and restrict what I do upload to 1024px JPEGs.
I guess it would be different if I was trying to earn a living from my photography.
October 14th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
I think even 1024px is too large, 600 is ok if you don’t mind them being used for the web.
Just my tuppence.
J