Who Controls Your Photos Online?
There has been quite a bit of buzz in the past day around Flickr, their API, and your privacy settings on your Flickr account thanks to a wonderful article by Jim Goldstein about How Every Flickr Photo Ended Up on Sale this Weekend. Jim goes into great detail on his post, that is worth the read, to discuss how the privacy settings on your Flickr account are not being enforced by Flickr with regards to their API. (the 120 comments on his posting, as of this posting, are also interesting to peruse). Jim’s post also created a parallel discussion on Thomas Hawk’s blog posting.
What I find most surprising is how everyone seemed to loose site of the real issue here. It’s not about a technical discussion on how Flickr should implement their API or each photographer’s opinion on how they license their work. It’s about a large name in the photography (Flickr/Yahoo) and the fact that they don’t respect their customers enough to protect their work. I can only image how this will propogate forward with the new arrangement between Flickr and Getty Images. Will your “selection” by a Getty Editor to have your Flickr photos be licensed through Getty automatically change your Creative Commons licensed work to All Rights Reserved so Getty can make money off your work
If I’m using a service that claims to protect my work by allowing me to not let anyone but myself to download the images, then the service should do that. In all access methods to the images. When Flickr found out that this protection was not being extended to the API, they should have fixed it for the sake of their customers rather than ignore it for the sake of their API development community. SmugMug had a similar security issue be raised in the recent past which they quickly fixed…this is how a responsible company should act toward their customers, maybe this is why SmugMug is actually turning a profit while Flickr never could?
(Note: I’m stopping short of talking about how I think Yahoo’s ownership and corporate problems might be related to the current state of Flickr and their customer focus.)
One of the frustrating points that the FocalPower team had with photo sharing/hosting was the the lack of focus on the photographer for the sake of the photo sharing/hosting provider. This has been one of the facets behind the FocalPower solution since the day we started building it. We feel that control should be given back to the photographers. If they photographer wants to protect their photo assets and legal rights, then the systems they use should help them in this cause, not hinder them. Likewise, if the photographer is more concerned with their images being accessible to the larger audience to use under the Creative Common’s licensing, make it easy for the photographer to enable this and track the effect that this has. Opening up your work to Creative Commons is done for a multiplicity of reasons, one of which is to help spread your brand…hence the with Attribution license. I always found it shocking that Flickr allowed you to license your work this way but then let anyone take the work without providing you attribution…why couldn’t they provide that attribution for you? Why make the photographer work harder?
These are some of the issues that we are working to address here at FocalPower. So keep an eye out as we wrap up our development effort and move toward an open beta of our Photo Asset Management system later this year.
Update: Scott Bourne has a wonderful post on this topic over at the TWIP Blog. A great view of this topic from a long time professional photographer.
Tags: Asset Management, Flickr, Open Beta, SmugMug
July 9th, 2008 at 9:46 am
Who Controls Your Photos Online?…
There has been quite a bit of buzz in the past day around Flickr, their API, and your privacy settings on your Flickr account. This raises the question of who should control your photos online?…
July 9th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Hi, FocalPower team! As you likely know, the recent activity of my company, Myxer.com, was one of the catalysts for Jim Goldstein’s masterful article. As he points out in his post, we immediately disabled our Flickr integration when we learned our service was distributing photos beyond the Creative Commons license.
Myk Willis, Myxer’s CEO, recently wrote a post on his personal blog about our Flickr integration, and the creative and philosophical intent powering it. It can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/5bws7f
I encourage you and your audience to read it, if only to learn more about the integration, to understand that Myxer did not sell any of the photos accessed via the Flickr API, and to see what Myxer has learned from this experience. As Myk writes in his post, these are “trying times for a massive number of creative people whose footing has been destabilized in this era of instant, zero-cost distribution of digital content on the internet.”
We’re all finding our footing here, and we appreciate the insight you and other bloggers are bringing to the conversation. If you or your readers need any further information about Myxer or future iterations of our Flickr integration, please feel free to contact me personally.
Best wishes,
–J.C. Hutchins
Social Media Marketing Manager, Myxer.com
jc.hutchins@myxer.com
July 11th, 2008 at 2:07 am
[...] up with It is Your Fault I steal Your Photos. Accept it. Please. FocalPower followed with a post on Who Controls Your Photos Online. The most recent great post on the subject is Plagiarism Today’s Is Flickr Letting Down its [...]
July 12th, 2008 at 6:23 am
[...] FocalPower wrote Who Controls Your Photos Online. [...]
July 12th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
JC,
Kudos to your company for doing the right thing by adjusting your application once you realized you were getting all photos, not just Creative Commons, from the Flickr feed. I am sure that Myxer’s professionalism in this manner is greatly appreciated by all photographers who protect their license and earn a living from their images.
And while we at FocalPower don’t have anything against the open APIs that make the web2.0 experience what it is, we do see it as a problem that a provider of an API (Flickr) wouldn’t abide by their communities’ wishes with regards to the licensing of said communities’ images. There are a lot of companies and individuals out there that are not as professional as yourselves who take advantage of this openness.
We feel this is still the heart of the matter.
July 25th, 2008 at 6:31 am
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