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.

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

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?…