Are Flickr Images Abused By Foreign Businesses?

eldavojohn writes "My friend Drew was notified via Twitter that one of his Flickr images had been selected as poster child for freeloaders who abuse the benefits system in an Elsevier news story in the Netherlands. The original image clearly gives an CC BY-NC 2.0 license to the image which doesn't appear in the story — a story which generates revenue for Elsevier. My friend doesn't speak Dutch so he's a little confused about what, if anything, he can do in this situation. I'm reminded of a family's Christmas photo showing up on a billboard in Prague and I wonder if photo sharing sites are treated as free to abuse regardless of copyright by foreign businesses? Has anyone else heard of this sort of thing happening with images from social photo sharing sites?"

Yes, and "oh well".

[The Living Fractal]

There are several [wikipedia.org] international copyright laws. That link will show you the participating countries. But even so, unless you're a top-tier photographer, it's not really worth the time it would take to pursue legal action. Your best bet is a good defense.

If you upload full size images to Flickr, etc, you're really just asking for someone to steal it and use it without your permission. So if you're that worried about it... don't use Flickr. But if you absolutely must, then you can take the annoying step of putting a watermark across the whole image, or, if you don't like to deface your work, there's also no reason you can't downsize the image to something like 800px at a low to medium DPI which makes it practically unusable for print.

All of that said though, people who steal images and use them without permission are, at least in my mind, in the same boat as people who steal music, warez, etc... if they can't get it for free they aren't going to buy it anyway.

Re:whatwhatwhat

[AmberBlackCat]

Maybe it would make sense if there were people willing to pay for pictures of you.

Re:whatwhatwhat

[The Living Fractal]

They don't, at least not under some laws, like those of the United States. Someone needs to obtain a release if they are going to make money off of a picture of you (unless there's no way to recognize it as YOU).

Simply email them!

[Xiph1980]

About every dutch person speaks English, so just write them an email saying you own the copyright to that image and would like to be payed a _reasonable_ amount for the usage of your photo. The Netherlands isn't some backwash country where they don't respect copyright. We don't always respect patents, when it comes to software patents, but we do with copyright, although not with the same absurd duration. Also, Elsevier is a politically right-wing magazine, and although I don't know their specific view on copyright, the political right tend to favor longer and stricter copyright terms. Perhaps that could be an advantage here. Also, don't start threatening with any legal action in the first email. That'll only incite a counter-attack. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar and all.

Re:How can you be a freeloader?

[kmdrtako]

It's one thing to pirate other people's work if you provide yours for free to all comers

Actually it's not okay to pirate anyone else's work, whether you provide yours for free or not.

Re:Why do you do it?

[timeOday]

But why on earth would anyone want to put up their family photos for the whole world to see in the first place?

So your extended family can see it without a lot of hassle.

Here's a better question: why not put it up for the whole wide world? Let's say you're the 1 in 1,000,000 that winds up on a billboard in Hungary. Who cares? If anything it's kind of cool. You were never going to get paid for your photos, and now you still aren't. Big deal.

CC licenses aren't to blame for your problems.

[jbn-o]

This story is written poorly (shocking for /., I know) because it has little to do with any of the players mentioned: Creative Commons (as opposed to other license writing organizations or other licenses), photography (as opposed to other artistic media), or Flickr (as opposed to other hosting services). This is just another instance of a wealthy organization (which can certainly afford the expense for due diligence) allegedly infringing someone's copyright. It can be dealt with on that basis and resolved amicably for the copyright holder. And, as with so many other copyright infringement cases, how amicable the resolution is for the alleged infringer is, at best, of secondary importance particularly because the license allows the licensee to do so much (derivative works, for example).

Speaking directly to your complaints: First, there are so many different CC licenses and they say significantly different things. So we can't have a reasonable discussion about them by lumping them together and referring to them as if they're a cohesive unit except to note that they're written and published by the same organization. Second, photos are no more exempt from extraction, reuse, and building upon (making derivative works) than any other form of expression (particularly with digital photo manipulation tools we have today). Third, I think the heart of your complaint has to do with what are referred to as "moral rights" in some jurisdictions. But moral rights have little to do with the CC licenses and far more to do with regional powers conferred to authors (moral rights aren't in the US, for instance). Any proper discussion of them would be independent of the copyright licensing for the work. If you want the power to reject the reuse of some work because of you disagree with a potential derivative work, you probably should not license the work to them at all under any license. Then, should they commit copyright infringement and make an unauthorized derivative work anyway, you get to see how CC licenses had nothing to do with that.

Re:So we now know who the real "freeloaders" are..

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, BoingBoing is cool and you're not. You know the hot chick at the bar? She drinks for free and you don't. She could probably stick a sword through the bartender and no one would do anything because she's the hot chick. If anyone calls them on it, BoingBoign will start calling them copyright trolls and making them seem like greedy idiots for asking for a share of their ad revenue. Then they'll get the EFF to defend them. That's because they're the hot chick and you're not.