Fight Over Yahoo’s Use of Flickr Photos | Hacker News Reader

Fight Over Yahoo’s Use of Flickr Photos

online.wsj.com

36 pointsalxndr40 comments

“It ticked me off that somebody else is selling them when I was giving them away,”

This is a really common. A person creates something and "licenses it freely" out of their own generosity, and then someone goes and profits from it.

It illustrates a very deep conflict that has existed, presumably since artists existed, but really came to the fore in the age of silicon. The first example I saw sort of "first hand" was Ward Christensen's XMODEM, which he made public domain, was being sold to the US Government by a contractor who was using it in their product.

The legal question is pretty clear, you license it such that others can legally profit from it and there isn't an issue from the point of view of the law.

But what is the moral question? I've asked people in this situation (having their free stuff resold) and they split almost 50/50 on the moral one, which is half say "If they are making a profit they should share it with me." and half land in the "Good for them, but if they ask for support I'm going to charge quintuple my normal rate."

Clearly a lot of issues can be avoided by being courteous, but it really does provide something of a litmus test of people's true feelings with respect to open source.

That's why creative commons share-alike exists. [1] Basically, you can use this freely as long as it's not for commercial purposes, and if you remix it in any way, then the result must be shared under the same license.

It solves the dilemma pretty well I think.

[1] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

You don’t even need the “NC” (no commercial) clause to get this effect. There is no need to restrict commercial activity without cause.

What you said is true for by-nc-sa, but not for by-sa.

Often its an issue of magnitude though. If someone wants to use a photo I've taken very small in the corner of a 200 page document, which forms part of a piece of work they have been paid by the government to do, its probably not objectionable. If someone however sells my software slightly tweaked and rebranded, its probably not OK.

There's a range of greys in there but the licencing is black and white.

Generic licenses like these should be black and white, otherwise you'd get even more expectations mismatches.

Thankfully, nothing forces you to use only a single license for your work! The best system for those grey cases, in my opinion, would be to publish the work under a NC license, but then add a message like "contact me if you want to use this work commercially" and offer specific licenses for such uses.

This is exactly why the GPL (and other copyleft licenses like CC-SA) exists. I can’t find a reference, but I recall reading that Richard Stallman initially considered using a permissive license, but decided not to, because he did not want, and he assumed others also not to want, to be a “doormat”.

No, this is not why the GPL was created. Richard Stallman has said repeatedly that he is fine with companies making money out of other people's GPLd software. The issue for him was whether derivatives were libre or not.

That's quite right, although the "doormat" sentiment is also true:

https://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.html

"But the other issue I was thinking about was, I wanted to give the community a feeling that it was not a doormat, a feeling that it was not prey to any parasite who would wander along. If you don't use copyleft, you are essentially saying: [speaking meekly] “Take my code. Do what you want. I don't say no.” So, anybody can come along and say: [speaking very firmly] “Ah, I want to make a non-free version of this. I'll just take it.” And, then, of course, they probably make some improvements, those non-free versions might appeal to users, and replace the free versions. And then, what have you accomplished? You've only made a donation to some proprietary software project."

RMS felt that what would make him a "doormat" was if his code ended up in a proprietary program, not if someone made money from it.

It's important to read Creative Commons licenses carefully: some grant other people the right to make money off of your original work in ways you never envisioned, without any compensation to you.

Photographer Thomas Hawk wrote, correctly: "If you are going to license your photos Creative Commons with no restriction, then you ought to be prepared for this type of use. If it’s not Flickr selling them, anyone else can, legally. If you are uncomfortable with this idea, then you should not use Creative Commons without any sort of restriction."[1]

The photographers who are now upset apparently never read those licenses. And they're irrevocable, according to Creative Commons itself[2], meaning there's no legal recourse if someone wants to sell coffee mugs or T-Shirts with your CC-BY or CC-BY-SA-licensed photos. To Yahoo's credit, they are voluntarily allowing photographers to opt-out.

(What's interesting is that of the 14 photographers interviewed by the WSJ in the linked article, 8 actually didn't care. I would have guessed that number would have been higher.)

This is a separate issue from the "handpicked" Flickr photos, with a 51% revenue split. The actual Yahoo announcement[3] says the handpicked rev-share option is "invite-only," so presumably photographers who opt-in are okay with the terms.

Legality aside, I suspect Yahoo will regret this move. Seems to me that the negatives outweigh the revenue (especially since anyone can also offer CC prints), and users may view it as at odds with Flickr's 2011 claim that "at Flickr, your photos are always yours." Also Google+ has better editing tools and free unlimited photo storage (for <=2048px, I think), so that might prompt folks to move their photos over.

[1] http://thomashawk.com/2014/11/the-controversy-around-flickr-...

[2] http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/10296

[3] https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157649323144986/pa...

Crash course in licenses for a lot of people, I don't know if Yahoo should be blamed for using licenses correctly.

Though it seems kind of under-handed that they're going to essentially forcefully profit from their own users. Why not give them 50% just out of good will? I would be very surprised to find out that Yahoo is depending on 100% of the cash they're getting from the sale of these photos (I'd imagine they have more lucrative pursuits)...

Also, this is probably an opportunity to create a site that caters to flicker users and allows them to sell their prints to people. And if you take only a small cut of the profit (let's say 10%) for access to the printing resources, you can make a lot of money.

What's really sad is that Yahoo is already giving 51% to the creators of other images, so they had to intentionally complicate their product and extend development time to distinguish between who to pay nothing to and who to pay. The article says people are already changing their licenses to opt-out. If Yahoo had gone the other way and rewarded them, maybe they would have gotten more people posting images, not a bunch of bad PR.

I intentionally chose to make my pics available for commercial use. As long as I get attribution I don't really care. A reasonable number of them have been used for various purposes and that makes me happy. (I have a pic on a sign in a state park, which is neat!)

That said, I'm a little annoyed that the company hosting the images is now actively trying to making money on them. It's not what I imagined. It doesn't bother me enough to complain about it, but it does change my perception of the "deal" I have with Flickr.

Yeah, it's definitely chafing people the wrong way (to say the least), I'm just surprised Yahoo would think that was fine, to do to the people who keep their site alive.

If I had my stuff on flickr with that license, I probably wouldn't care either, but still it's bad PR they definitely don't need

I remember, about 20 years ago, when some people started making and selling Linux CDs (Walnut Creek or some others). Some people on the Linux mailing list (or newsgroup, my recollection is only approximate) were upset that some people were making money with their work (or with other people works, here again my recollection is approximate).

Then Linus said: that's fine. And then, over the years, a billion dollar industry emerged.

Except for the fact that I don't expect a billion dollar photo printing industry to emerge from the CC-licensed pictures hosted by yahoo, 500px and others, I think we have a similar situation here.

Maybe if Lawrence Lessig wrote something about the situation, this would help a bit, though I don't think Lessig has the same aura over the amateur photographers (after all, he is only the guy who wrote the license) than Linus over the kernel afficionados.

Flickr gives anyone the ability to bulk change the license on their images to one that doesn't include commercial use. Just go to this page:

https://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/license/?from=privacy

Clearly the users that are upset didn't really understand the license that they chose.

Sure, but once you've licensed the images under a certain CC license, you can't really go back. Yahoo will probably obey the user choice (as I think they should) but legally aren't under any obligation to do so.

I'm not sure. The user owns the content. If they decide to change the license then Yahoo has to pull those photos from the pool.

Nope. That's the "irrevocable" part of the CC licenses (as well as in most FOSS licenses).

Yep, Yahoo has said they will honor user choices and allow folks to opt-out by changing CC licenses. The November 20 announcement says:

"Flickr members who don't want their CC-BY or CC-BY-SA photos to be eligible for sale as part of Flickr Wall Art can change the license (e.g. CC-BY-NC, etc.) and the images will be removed from the selection." https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157649323144986/pa...

What's interesting is that CC licenses are irrevocable. So if a hypothetical GreatPhotoPrints.com bulk-downloaded CC-BY- and CC-BY-SA-licensed photos, they could continue to sell coffee mugs, t-shirts, posters, canvas prints, etc. -- even if the Flickr user changed the license later. (And of course if Yahoo ever became desperate for cash, they could reverse the current policy decision that currently permits opting out.)

I thought you had to explicitly pick a license when uploading to flickr, I guess the photographers in this article must have randomly clicked on a non-NC CC license without understanding their actions? It's not like this is hidden away in some 100 page T&C?

Stupidity. Licenses are hard to understand in general, but they almost certainly said "Creative Commons, Commercial Use, Attribution"

And then when somebody comes along and takes them up exactly on that offer and they get offended: "That's not what I meant... I didn't know somebody would actually do it... Gosh golly, those evil corporations are doing exactly what I told them they could do... It's not right! This is what's wrong with America!"

I think it would have been good/better to reach out to people, give them a chance to opt-out if they weren't cool with it, but it could be nice to view flickr as not just images on the screen but potentially images on the wall too because there is some really nice stuff out there.

Considering that people do not read EULAs, that is not surprising.

If you don't want someone using your photos for commercial use, choose a license that says that. I was expecting an article where Yahoo was using these photos without permission (ala Facebook advertising) but this is just a case of someone who didn't read the license details when she posted the photos to the Creative Commons album.

tl;dr: People who gave permission to use photos in certain ways upset that others use photos in those ways.

I don't understand the CC options offered by Flickr. I personally don't see any Commercial options. Here are the options I see:

- Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons (my default option)

- Attribution-NonCommercial Creative Commons

- Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons

- Attribution Creative Commons

- Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons

- Attribution-NoDerivs Creative Commons

- Attribution-NonCommercial Creative Commons

Which one is the commercial one?

BTW: You can reset the license on your entire photostream by doing a batch reset: https://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/license/batch/

It's the ones that don't say NonCommercial.

And I think that's the real problem, they're poorly named. They should explicitly say Commercial.

Creative Commons made an ideological decision to make Commercial licenses the default, and they promote them as "Free Cultural Works" to make them sound more appealing.

But it's only commercial in the sense that it permits commercial use, but it also explicitly leave the creator out of any compensation beyond attribution.

For CC BY, CC BY-SA, and CC BY-ND, Creative Commons itself explicitly mentions the word "commercial" in its summaries: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

Of course, if your description is correct, Yahoo/Flickr may have an interest in downplaying that important detail.

Creative Commons made an ideological decision to make Commercial licenses the default

Of course they did. They also made an ideological decision in creating the licenses in the first place. This connotation of "ideological" with "bad" is obnoxious.

they promote them as "Free Cultural Works" to make them sound more appealing.

Yeah, just like people say "free speech" even though you often have to pay to get your speech across.

Or maybe it's not about money at all.

But I'm sure you were just unaware of that. It's not like HN talks about it every other month.

Yahoo's actual announcement on November 20 says they're using "a subset of Creative Commons images ('safe' photos with license type CC-BY and CC-BY-SA)." See:

https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157649323144986/pa...

I think it's absolutely appropriate for people to complain about free riders on CC licenses. It's pretty clear that most people who use CC licenses mean to promote creative reuse of their works by the broader creative community. An implicit, if not legally mandated, requirement for reuse in many cases is that you add something to the work.

Clearly, just selling prints en mass is mechanical enough that it fails to meet many people's personal threshold for what constitutes a creative addition. But practically speaking, it's impossible to add a legal definition of "creative addition" without just creating an explicit list of creative augmentations. Such a formulation would necessarily defeat any novel creative forms, and so such a formulation is antithetical to the ideals behind Creative Commons. So, enforcement must be relegated to the realm of social norms.

That's what's going on here. Creators are saying Yahoo are being jerks for using using their works in a way that meet the letter of the license, but not the spirit.

I think many free content creators would disagree with you on what the spirit of cc-by is.

Hmm... that very well may be, and it even strikes me as probable. The nebulousness of the expectations regarding what CC means, and should mean is central to this entire episode. Part of the reason that CC exists is that copyright makes it difficult to share your work without either just giving it completely away, or striking explicit deals on an ad hoc basis. CC was a partial solution, but it's not really high resolution enough to satisfy everyone's needs and/or expectations in such dynamic and diverse areas as the pursuits of art.

That's why I say that social norm is an appropriate companion to CC here, because the formation of social norms allow for nuance that one size fits most CC licensing really doesn't.

Further, independent artists are typically going to be at a large disadvantage when trying to enforce licenses against large institutions, so to the extent that it is used by small independents, it's in many ways a system that relies on generally charitable intentions all around. I'm sure there are examples of independents taking on larger organizations, but I suspect that if it becomes clear that the only way to get what you want out of a CC license is to adopt a litigious stance, then it's adoption would decline pretty dramatically.

Props to the article author for including the opinions of some photographers who were fine with Yahoo's usage of their pictures. It would have been very easy to create a hit piece which only included quotes from people who were offended by the operation.

I wonder what's stopping anyone from slurping up all Flickr's CC-licensed photos and beating Yahoo at their own game. Certainly not copyright law.

What is the opposite of the Midas Touch? Whatever it is, Yahoo has it, at least with the things it has purchased.

Judas kiss.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_of_Judas

This should be a reminder to many that 'there is no such thing as a free lunch'.

...only free beer

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