Sophos Cloud Optix
Yahoo’s going to have to sell a whole heap of Flickr users’ kitty photos printed onto canvas – that will be up to $49 each, thank you very much – in order to cover the cost of the goodwill it’s losing by not cutting photographers in on the deal.
That’s the word from Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, who left the company in 2008 and who told The Wall Street Journal that Yahoo’s plan appears “a little shortsighted”.
That plan reads like this: Yahoo, which is Flickr’s owner, intends to make canvas prints from 50 million Creative Commons-licensed photos posted on the site, selling them for up to $49 apiece.
It’s also going to make the canvas prints from an unspecified number of other non-CC-licensed photos handpicked from Flickr.
For those handpicked photos, Yahoo’s going to give 51% of sales to the image creators. For the Creative Commons images, Yahoo’s planning to pocket all of the revenue.
Unfortunately, as photographers who’ve publicly shared more than 300 million Flickr images under Creative Commons licenses are realizing, what Yahoo’s doing is entirely legal.
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools.
Part of that mission is an online repository of images and writings that creators allow others to reuse and repurpose, free, under certain conditions, including ensuring that the artists receive credit in any derivative work, or whether the works can be used for commercial purposes.
Therein lies the rub: Yahoo’s only selling prints of works licensed under the CC clause that allows for commercial use. And yes, it’s pasting a small sticker with the artists’ names on the work.
But just because it’s legal doesn’t mean the photographers are happy about it.
The WSJ talked to 14 image creators, eight of whom were, in fact, pleased that they’d be getting more exposure for their work.
But six of the artists were displeased with Yahoo’s plans, which many say hew to the letter of the law but which thwart the spirit of CC.
One such is Liz West, who goes by the user name “Muffet” on Flickr.
West has freely shared her photos with others for commercial use when they ask, and she’s received sweet thank-you gifts in exchange: a small stove, a box of notecards.
Yahoo’s gall in not asking if it can use her photos, planning to do so to make a profit, and then giving her bupkis in exchange irks her, she told the WSJ:
It ticked me off that somebody else is selling them when I was giving them away.
Nelson Lourenço, a photographer in Lisbon, Portugal, said in an email to the WSJ that he had meant for his CC-licensed images to be used for, well, articles such as this one, for example – not for a major company to sell for profit:
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 public. [Yahoo] ... selling my work and getting the full money out of it came as a surprise.
Some photographers with CC-licensed Flickr photos are removing the license from some or all of their online images to prevent Yahoo from selling them. A Yahoo spokeswoman told the WSJ that there’s no other way to opt out of the program.
To change licensing on Flickr photos, you can go to Albums and select Batch edit, then Change licensing.
From there, you can set licensing to All rights reserved:
This won’t help much for photographers who are entrenched on Flickr, unfortunately.
One such is Devon Adams, a high-school photography teacher who has Creative Commons-licensed works up on the site – some 58,000 of them, in fact.
How do you un-Flickr and un-Yahoo all that?
Not easily, he told the WSJ:
I’m so heavily invested in Flickr; it’s not that I can just go somewhere else.
Unfortunately, this is yet another example of how storing content in the cloud – as in, on somebody else’s computer – can lead to a serious lack of control over that data.
Image of For Sale stamp courtesy of Shutterstock.
I feel Naked Security is really doing Yahoo/Flickr a huge disservice in this article. Really setting them up as ‘the big evil corporation’. Tom Lee was right when he wrote ‘Flickr users are wrong’.
In fact, nothing was stopping me half a year ago from doing exactly what Flickrs wants to do now. And because of Creative Commons I would not have had to tell anyone about it.
The real problem is that, once again, people do not understand the terribly convoluted thing that is copyright. They thought CC-BY sounded good, they just wanted to be credited, but chose to forget that this means anyone can resell their work without telling them. Photographers chose to use a licence without knowing what it meant.
Yes, I think it would have been nice if some of the profits came back to the photographers. Maybe even as credit towards a Flickr Pro account, giving them an incentive to licence photos under Creative Commons if they want to use Flickr for free? But I also think this article (and several others) paint Yahoo/Flickr as more of a boogieman than they are.
Well, some photographers will see some profits. This article mentions giving 51% of the profits to the image creators in the case of selling non-CC photos. What the article fails to mention, however, is that it’s an invite-only, opt-in new feature called Flickr Marketplace. Invitees receive an email chock-o-block with info about Marketplace. This is exactly how Marketplace works, and every invited photographer is provided with all the needed information to decide whether or not to participate. I’ve been a member of Flickr since 2006, and am happy to whine and complain about it, but come ON. There is no scandal here whatsoever.
Hang on a sec – Yahoo let photographers specify the license before uploading, and they allow you to select the non-commerical CC license. They also allow you to set that as your default, so you don’t have to remebmer to do it every time. They also clearly show the licensing under every image.
From this article it seems to me Yahoo are honouring all licenses, so there is absolutely no scandal here at all. If photogaphers chose to allow commerical use, they have no right to complain when their images are used commercially THEY CHOSE THAT OPTION!
All I see here is people blaming others for their own mistakes, and Yahoo honouring users choices about image licensing.
Usually this site is a source of clear and level-headed news, this article is a noteable and disapoiting deviation from that norm.
I second Martijn… this has more to do with what level CC license the Flickr user chose. If they picked a license that allowed for commercial use, then anyone–including Flickr–can use them commercially. All photogs have to do is change to one of the Non-Commercial CC options
This is a non-story. Flickr are selling prints of images where the photographer has explicitly set a type of licence that says, essentially, “anyone can take this image and use it for commercial purposes”. What did photographers think would happen if they set this licence type? I can’t really see why they’re making a fuss instead of just changing their licencing, and I’m surprised Naked Security would publish a story like this — it’s the kind of thing you’d expect to see on Lifehacker or Petapixel.
People are mad because the terms THEY AGREED TO IN WRITING are being followed. Well that’s tough. They should have read what they were agreeing to. They “didn’t ask”? Yes they did, when you uploaded your photos. “How does one ‘un-Flickr’ all that”? By changing the licensing en masse. I really doubt that that guy with the 58,000 shots has 1) all good ones that anyone would want printed; and 2) has more than a few, if that, that Yahoo IS printing. Just re-license them. Honestly this is people who are upset at others doing what they allowed them to do. It really doesn’t make sense.
I agree that Yahoo is doing nothing wrong. Unless looking out for their shareholders is wrong.
This article could have been written just as a heads up to folk to consider what they do with their content before they upload it, whether that’s setting licensing options or setting privacy settings (read Facebook).
The point in the last paragraph is a valid one – uploading your content into the public cloud without understanding your privacy / licensing settings IS a problem. But it’s a problem in Userland, not Corporationland.
You’re all within your rights to slap me around for this one. Yes, content creators should familiarize themselves with the licensing terms. Unfortunately, Yahoo’s move is taking them by surprise because the mores that have sprung up around CC usage is that you don’t profit off of freely shared material in this way.
I know, I know, mores, schmores, Yahoo’s actions are legal, yes. But it’s just not a good move for Yahoo, image-wise and make-nice-with-your-users-wise. There are other sites that could have been doing similar things but that choose to cut in the artists. Why couldn’t Yahoo have had a look at what they’re doing and taken a similar route?
This has a lot less to do with “storing content in the cloud” than it does with content licensing.
You could be running your own web server in your office/home with your own custom photo gallery software. If you license those photos via one of the Creative Commons licenses that allows commercial re-use, you’ve just *explicitly allowed* anyone to do the exact same thing.
Yes, this is why I don’t use the Creative-Commons-Commercial license (only the non-Commercial one). I’ve never understood the motivation for using the commercial license; it doesn’t even require any reciprocality, so I can’t even justify using it as being for the common good (unlike, say, the GNU license),
Flickr does allow you to relicense all of your photos in bulk, so people shouldn’t complain.
However, by the same token, if Flickr really thinks it can make money from doing this it is stabbing itself in the foot by not providing any remuneration. The end result will just be that everyone will re-license their photos and Flickr will be out in the cold. This is a typical Silicon Valley Libertarian Jerk Move: just because you can get away with selling something without paying for it doesn’t mean that it’s right or to your long term best interest.
I am with the other commenters that this is a non-story. I wouldn’t have done it if I were Yahoo! because it was predictable it would have this publicity as a result, but it’s important to note that the ToS for Flickr is one of the most restrictive on the hosting provider I’m aware of. Yahoo!’s ToS doesn’t grant them permission to do this, it’s only granted by licensing (which, as noted in other posts, is granted universally. Anyone could do the same thing with the same licensing rights.)
Facebook, at the other end of the spectrum, requires unlimited and irrevocable rights to relicense for themselves in order to handle your photo, so they could establish their own stock agency that licenses photos to third parties for a fee without compensating or even crediting the owner. I haven’t read Google’s ToS in the last few years, but the last time I did read them they were closer to Flickr than they were to Facebook.