[PHOTO] "Yahoo Starts Selling Flickr Users’ Photos"

[rfmcdonald]

zibblsnrt, long since departed from Livejournal but now on Facebook, did me and others the kindness of sharing Newstex's Susan Gunelius' article describing how Yahoo! would begin selling Flickr users' photos, without providing appropriate recompense or even sufficient credit, if they had selected insufficiently stringent copyright settings. I altered the licensing on my photos last night, happily. I was one of those users that had not paid sufficient attention to what the Creative Commons licenses I defaulted to did, and did not, allow.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo! will begin selling prints of 50 million Creative Commons-licensed images uploaded by Flickr users as well as an unspecified number of other photos uploaded by users that will be handpicked from Flickr. Images bearing a Creative Commons licenses that allow for commercial use will be sold as canvas prints for up to $49 each with no payments going to the image owners. Instead, Yahoo! will retain all revenues. However, each canvas print will include a “small sticker bearing the name of the artist.” Handpicked images won’t have the Creative Commons license that allows for commercial use, so owners of those images will receive 51% of the sales revenue with Yahoo! keeping the rest.

There are more than 300 million images on Flickr with Creative Commons licenses. Of course, the missing link here is the question of copyright owner vs. author. The person who uploads a photo to Flickr and puts a Creative Commons license on it might not be the owner of the copyright. In copyright law, the owner and creator aren’t necessarily the same person (or entity) either. In other words, many images on Flickr bearing Creative Commons licenses might not even be licensed correctly to begin with.

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Creative Commons licenses were created to foster sharing because some people believed that copyright laws were too stringent. There was no option that made it easy to give large audiences permission to share and use creative works. Fast-forward to 2014, and you can bet that a large number of those 300 million Creative Commons-Commerical licenses on Flickr were applied to images by people who didn’t understand what they were doing. The outcry among Flickr users’ who are unhappy with Yahoo!’s new revenue-generation strategy proves this.

Many Flickr users are changing the licenses on their uploaded images and others are removing their images from the site entirely. As Nelson Lourenco, a photographer from Lisbon, Portugal, told The Wall Street Journal, “When I accepted the Creative Commons license, I understood that my images could be used for things like showing up in articles or other works where they could be showed to the public. [Yahoo!] selling my work and getting the full money out of it came as a surprise.”

Copyright law exists so people can protect their creative work and exploit it for their own commercial gain. If owners of creative works choose to license their works using a Creative Commons license, they need to fully understand what they’re agreeing to and what they’re giving up.