Comments on: The White House Confused PhotoStream

By: Blown to Bits » Blog Archive » Copyfraud

Blown to Bits » Blog Archive » Copyfraud — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 22:21:37 +0000

[…] The White House Confused PhotoStream […]

By: Harry Lewis

Harry Lewis — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:51:23 +0000

Thanks, E. You are correct. And thanks to Michelle Thorne for pointing me to this Flickr blog post:

the reasons we don’t have a PD option:

(i) Unlike CC licenses, you can’t take PD back – once it is done, it is done. I spec’d out a three stage confirmation (including typing out that you understand what it means) but this was seemed like too much and we didn’t want the support hassle. People are free to use the description field to specify their PD desires.

(ii) There are liabilities that we don’t want to take on if we allow people to claim something is public domain without actual checking the chain of title – if they don’t own it in the first place, we can get in trouble. (This is also true of CC images, but at least that can be changed after the fact and there is less of a chance of the image just “escaping” in the wild.)

All of which says to me that the solution is not for Obama to get a special case from Flickr, but for him to realize that copyright law is buggy, and to fix it.

By: Elisabeth

Elisabeth — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:47:24 +0000

Yep, it’s clearly wrong – but it’s not all the White House’s mistake. As the Creative Commons blog points out, “Flickr doesn‚Äôt allow their photographers to choose Public Domain as an option to release their work to the world. So the Obama team must have picked the next best option: Attribution only.”

Seems like Flickr needs to update their licensing options for a world where the Feds are posting. As for the White House…seems like a bit of a bind. Either post the photos under a slightly inappropriate license, or don’t post them on that particular (very popular) photo site at all. I prefer the former, given that decision. On the other hand, I kind of wonder if Flickr might add an option to their licensing list if the one doing the asking was the most powerful person in the world…