I would be flattered if someone liked my images enough to download for their personal use. However, I'd be irate if some company took my images and sold them for their own profit.. - Becca
But the question is ought it be Flickr's job to try to design their system and police those who use their API? Should flickr be required to monitor every single API key for copyright enforcement? Some use the API for personal tools, others use it for commercial purposes. My own feeling is that Flickr should not have to play the role of copyright police -- that misuse of imagery ought to be between a photographer and the offending party. - Thomas Hawk
I'm not familiar with Flickr's API, but I imagine it's pretty easy to retrieve the license data for each image. If so, the responsibility rests solely on the API consumer to make sure what they're doing with the images is legit. I suppose if Flickr really wanted to be proactive about it, they could provide a "Don't expose my images through the API" option. No one would ever see those pictures again, but at least the copyright would be slightly more secure. - James Williams (willia4)
James, Flickr already has a way for users to opt out of the API if they want. If people are that concerned about misuse then I think it is their responsibility to opt out, not Flickr's responsibility to play copyright police. You can opt in/out of the API on Flickr here: http://www.flickr.com/account/... - Thomas Hawk
Ok. Then I don't understand the problem. Flickr's already giving their users the the tools to keep their photos from showing up in random API places. There's nothing to see here. Move along. - James Williams (willia4)
Becca, this is the whole point of this discussion. If you tag your images with a specific copyright, legally that should be honored by all who want to use that image. - Jeff P. Henderson
I'd be interested to know if policing the use of the API changes Flickr's liability in regard to safe harbor? Do they move from being not responsible for how people may misuse copyright of photos that happen to be hosted on Flickr, to being liable for that misuse? If they do, I can see why they would not get involved with policing the API - Mike McBride
Right, flickr gives you both the option to block your images from external search and API, and the option to allow the programs *you want* to access your files through your API key, I don't see a big issue aside from the fact that those options aren't made more clear to new users and/or asking users to set them as part of the setup process. On top of that, you can choose who can/cannot see certain sized files of yours. All the tools are in place, it's whether/how you use them or not. - cmiper
I don't think that Flickr should have to play copyright police and monitor all usage for their API for violation, and the courts would most likely uphold this as they have with ISP's liability for people distributing copyrighted music over their networks. But it seems that they might be able to rewrite the API to plug the holes or make it easier for programmers to abide by the rules. This might fall under the category of being a good citizen on the net. - Jeff P. Henderson
Flickr is just horrific with its users and very cavalier with their photos. Completely disrespectful imho. - Vinny
@cmiper That is good information. I will look into how this all works. It is definitely not clear to most users that they have an option to control how their images are seen/used and by whom. If this is the case then Jim's original issue is really a non issue, and he just need to configure Flicker to function to meet his copyright needs. - Jeff P. Henderson
Part of the problem Jeff might be that Jim doesn't want to totally opt out of the API. For instance. He might enjoy that people can see his photos in PicLens or Flickrleech or other apps (or maybe not), but wants to restrict it to other companies. Much of the API use is not dependent on individual permission given to approved apps. Still, I think if it matters that much to someone that they should just opt out entirely. - Thomas Hawk
An API white-list doesn't seem like it'd be worth implementing. I'm sure the VAST majority of Flickr's users wouldn't ever use it, if only because most of us (myself included) just don't take very good or interesting pictures. I'm not really worried about someone stealing the snapshot I made of my mom's dog, after all. If I really cared, I'd get my pics off flickr and on to my own server and do white-listing with .htaccess files. Not that anyone would go to the trouble of accessing my site then. - James Williams (willia4)
I just don't understand why those who have their photos marked All Rights Reserved don't get their photos removed from any API apps by default. Seems like common sense to me. I don't think it's asking them to be copyright police by simply telling them "Hey, if that photo has this license, keep it to yourself." If they aren't going to honor the licenses in the first place, why give people the ability to set them at all? - Vinny
Thomas, I think you left out some key information. Flickr allows you to mark your photos as to whether you're willing to share them or not, but the API disregards that information. While you may be perfectly willing to let someone else profit from your photos, others may not. My view follows what Becca wrote. If Flickr's API followed the same rules as it sets for a person viewing photos on their site, this would not be an issue. That's the key issue as I see it. - William Beem
@James - Why should I have to deactivate a useful feature just because one vendor broke the rules? Perhaps I want to use BigHugeLabs.com or Moo.com to access my Flickr photos and provide a service, but I don't want them sold without providing me any notice or income. I don't like being used. - William Beem
William, see my comment above, you have to OPT IN to use those services, which you do through YOUR API key. Blocking unauthorized access through API/search does not affect this. - cmiper
@William - Why should Flickr have to spend development, QA, localization, maintenance, and documentation resources implementing an API white-list feature because one vendor broke the rules? And why would anyone put their pictures on the Internet if they really cared about people copying them? Once it's on the Internet, that's it. Game over. It's going to be copied and shared and ripped-off if it's any good. Period. I just don't see how this is Flickr's responsibility. - James Williams (willia4)
It is flickr's responsibility because they allow you to set a license on your photos and then they just choose to ignore them in the API. That's 100% on them. - Vinny
So...you would be perfectly happy if they just removed the license information? ::shrugs:: I'd rather they didn't, personally. - James Williams (willia4)
Well, really, what good is it if they don't do anything with it? It would be trivial for them to not pass photos with certain licenses out through the API. Why not just do it? - Vinny
Unbelievable! Why should Flickr make it's own API follow its own rules? I'm stunned that you would even ask that question. This isn't so much about Flickr being a copyright cop as it is about Flickr being consistent between its presentation and its API. - William Beem
If you folks would click on "Show XX more comments" above, you would see that you can OPT OUT of access to your photos through the API except for third party apps that you authorize to have access to them. The tools are there, if you don't use them then they are useless. - cmiper
Why should people not have the benefit of the Flickr API just because someone abuses it? That's just punishing the people who don't abuse it because of the actions of a handful who do. - Ian Betteridge via twhirl
What if I don't want to block ALL my photos? Again, this is why they give you granularity with licensing; so you can license photos as you see fit. They have the mechanism in place to do this already and just choose not to use it. Truth is, they don't care, never have, and never will, about their users. - Vinny
The API is just a data layer. It's not supposed to follow the rules of the presentation layer. That's why the API lets people do so many cool things: by not having the restrictions of the web page. This is just another one of those things; it seems to be the only one anyone's up in arms about. And I can't see a good solution that wouldn't also remove the desired functionality of sites like moo.com. So...what's the better idea? - James Williams (willia4)
If they can allow you to opt out of the API entirely, they can allow certain licenses to not appear in the API. It really is that simple. - Vinny
The "better idea" is to improve the API. - William Beem
So just because I don't mark my picture as CC, I'm not allowed to make a Moo card with it? See, if they did THAT, I'd agree that they obviously don't care about their users. - James Williams (willia4)
I think it would be handy if Flickr would provide me the ability to see who accesses my photos through the API and how the photos are used. That way policing my copyrights is in my hands and not in the hands of some programming logic. Don't forget that Flickr was designed to share and distribute images widely. Don't be surprised when they get out. If you that concerned with protecting you work, use PhotoShelter or similar service that is designed for controlled distribution instead of Flickr. - Aaron Schaub via fftogo
If Flickr API allows others to sell your photos when you dont want them to, Flickr should stop it. - CJPhoto
For people saying that you should not post pictures if you do not want them stolen, replace photos as a medium with a different medium say text or video. The same problem applies and with those mediums, there seems to be far more outcry when content is stolen rather than the cavalier attitude towards stolen photos. I would hate to see DRM become the norm for pictures but there needs to be respect for copyright along with proper attribution. - Jauder Ho
Flickr needs to do the right thing here and enforce licenses as part of fetching images via RSS and the API. - Jauder Ho
I find your view surprising Tom. It's NOT OK for someone to infringe your right to take photos but IT IS OK for someone to infringe your rights to use your work with out consent. If the later doesn't matter why would the former? I am not asking Flickr to police copyrights I am asking Flickr to abide by their end of our agreement. I have not given them blanket permission to distribute my photography. I have been... see the remainder of my reply here http://thomashawk.com/2008/07/... - Jim Goldstein
I am also torn by this article. I am in the midst of researching if it is worth attempting to sell some of my photos to be able to invest and feed my hobby. I don't think this is a bad thing, and if I were selling my photos I definitely would want to make sure they were protected in fairness to those who paid for it. This is assuming I can get people to pay for my bad photos of course. =) - Alex Almeida
Great conversation. In terms of good business practice it seems that Flickr should take action if their terms of service are being violated and if the wishes of their customers is being ignored. In terms of copyright infringement, intellectual property of any type should be respected. I equally admire those who choose to give their photos away for free and those who require compensation, and in either case the wishes of the image owner should be respected. Like i-tunes - free and paid music side by side - Krista Neher
It's still a very troubling law for anyone in the forensics business, which normally doesn't require a PI license, and it gives the freedom to do forensics to any PI, whether they are qualified or not. - Mike McBride
Great link. A little technical, but... I think I got it. In car terms, look past your front bumper and focus a little further down the road. :-) - Kevin Donahue
Kev I agree on the technical, I actually think it would help to re-read tonight, with the camera in my hands, ya' know? - Mike McBride
“Can someone please explain to me why it is a *good* thing that FriendFeed only provides partial feeds?? That is still my biggest barrier-to-entry for FF. ”
I think the point of it is to quickly show what's going on so partial feeds keeps the page clean and moving. read more = click through. But where it breaks down is multiple posts of an item and comments everywhere. - Rob Williams
I would agree with you. I know I am totally guilty of over-extending my feeds to the point that I have duplications of my duplications. - Kevin Donahue
I like clean feeds to allow others to subscribe to what they want. but it gets messy when aggregators get involved! I posted on orangejack.com today and those subbers get it. Then I cross-promoted it on Twitter. FF picks up both. Not sure how to get around it when there are different audiences. - Rob Williams
That's my problem exactly, Rob, on the dup feed aggregation -- distinct audiences with distinct consuming styles. - Kevin Donahue
It is completely useless as an RSS Feedreader, because of the titles only feeds. I've started thinking about hiding the blogs of people I already have in GReader, just using FF to follow their "other" stuff. - Mike McBride
That's a pretty smart idea, Mike. As someone who really *doesn't* use FF (because of the full-feed feature), I'm really trying to figure out how to maximize my FF experience. - Kevin Donahue
I haven't really gotten into it yet, though I have played around with it. Seems like something Microsoft should have done with OneNote. - Mack D. Male
I've had it for a while, I wasn't that impressed, but then again, I don't know if it's something I need. Could be great for some. - Greg Hollingsworth via twhirl
I think Evernote gives your camera phone a purpose. - Kreg Steppe
The one feature I would really like to see is the ability to not sync certain notebooks with the web version. That would let me use it at work, as it is I can't use it for work stuff because I cannot share all of that info with a web service. - Mike McBride
This is the wrong headed approach to what I blogged about last night. If you want to be paid for using a smartphone during your non-work hours, be careful what you wish for! - Mike McBride
Wonder if Firefox will get the beating other services get at times like this? I doubt it. Still, it's hard to help set a record when I can't get to the download site. - Mike McBride
I use Blogger, but only to publish to my own domain, so if I need to leave or get kicked off, I still have all the published pages. I don't use free hosting for my personal stuff, let alone business! - Mike McBride
I don't know if all my followers can be listed. How many pages am I allowed for an obituary? :) - Morton Fox
@mortonfox I wasn't going to list them all by name "He leaves behind 53 LinkedIn connections, 49 Facebook friends and 100's RSS readers... - Mike McBride
We love Twitter. We hate when it’s down. If you’re addicted to Twitter as well, tweet your heart out through Twiddict and avoid life-changing withdrawal symptoms during Twitter downtime. We’ll make sure your tweets end up where they belong. - Mike McBride
I hadn't ever really thought about this, because law firms are in the business of selling legal work, and their lawyers, but it is something to think about. I wonder how many clients would like to know we have a litigation support department, for example? - Mike McBride
Actually Twitter never blamed anyone, the post you link to inferred it. What Twitter said was in response to a question about what users could do to lighten the load, temporarily while they worked out the larger issues. - Mike McBride
There's a comment in that post that is the perfect reason why I hate politics. Someone actually pointed out pending legislation that they completely agree with. In fact, they see it as being an extremely positive step, but they don't want it to pass because it was Bush's idea. What a crock... - Mike McBride
“Social Feedback Loop: posting a comment to a twitter on Friendfeed causes a tweet to occur, which then causes a tumblog entry, which then creates a Friendfeed entry, which then creates an entry on my Facebook account. Oy.”
Careful - you might bring down the Internet in one big DNS attack. - Hutch Carpenter
Man, someone dug deep into the archives! I eventually disabled Mento, which was causing the loop. Good idea on paper, not a fan so much in implementation. - Mark Trapp
if everybody just opened their little APIs to work together we would not have to jury rig everything to work like this- it would be comment once comment everywhere! - Nathan Eckenrode
I'm kinda confused as to why you would need multiple aggregators... - Rahsheen Porter
I'm confused too, this isn't a technology problem, it's an end user problem. Maybe if you didn't feel the need to be on every service and then have all those services feed into every other service? Just sayin' - Mike McBride
This was an off-hand observation I made about 2 weeks ago. It was definitely a (hilarious in a nerdy way) end-user problem that was resolved pretty quickly. I think it'd be nice to see some sort of smartness, though: if you got the message from Twitter, don't keep posting it out to other services. A simple feature for "Don't repost messages I didn't manually create" would be killer. - Mark Trapp
And just imagine all of those individual entries shows up on FriendFeed as an individual entries!! Thats what is called un-necessary noise.. isnt it ?? - Jigar Mehta via bTT
@Mike, well, different services has 'status' message or say, 'what am i doing' kinda message but thats not the only thing they do, each and every service provides different social connectivity with network, and many a times it happens not everybody in your network can be found on just one service! - Jigar Mehta via bTT
I think the meat of what Mike M. is saying is that you shouldn't have everything feeding into everything else. I am confusd because I can't thnk of one situation where I would need more than one aggregator. I'm all about FriendFeed, though, so I was hoping to learn something :) - Rahsheen Porter
I've been waiting for something like this to occur; reminds me of the reddit article pointing to digg which points to reddit - acedanger
No way I would pay $250 a year. But I certainly would be willing to pay something if it would help the service improve on stability. - Gregory Pittman via twhirl
I would pay something, but $250 a year would cut into my gaming/tinkering budget. - Harvey Simmons
Not sure I would be willing to pay; I'm not that addicted to it that I need it up all the time. at any cost - Daniel Robitaille
I won't pay that much. That's more than what I've been paying for anything else on the web. - Morton Fox
I'd pay, but not $20 / month -- there are services that do more and they are free - Shey
I'd pay $40. Or more. See now there's a business plan that's obvious. What's wrong with them? ;) - Aaron Brazell via twhirl
Not sure throwing money at the problem will fix it right now, but in principle, yeah, I'd pay. - Mike Stanley via twhirl
Didn't they recently get a bucket or two load of money thrown at em? - Michael W. May
if thats the case i wont pay & switch to pownce & friendfeed - sam via twhirl
how could try provide that for the people that pay and leave everyone else in the dust .. kinds sounds like extortion to me - JohnBfromMemphis
I'd be willing to pay $20 a year, as I did with Pownce, but anything beyond that would be unlikely. I love Twitter, but it's far from a necessity for me. - Evan Sims
I'd consider it; but I'm not sure I would feel any assurance that my paying a subscription would guarantee any uptime... - Phil Crissman
That's more than I pay for hosting, for 2 sites. I like Twitter, but not that much. - Mike McBride
Nope. Maybe $20 a *year* Twitter is "nice to have" not "mission critical." and there are several worthy competitors, e.g. FriendFeed, Jaiku and Pownce. Get a grip. - ron k jeffries
If all I was paying for was uptime, I would stop using Twitter. You should provide the same uptime, no matter what kind of account you have. - Anthony Thompson via twhirl
I would rather write my own twitter if I am paying for is up time...paying for up time is like making a donation to your church/temple/mosque for blessings...say what??? - Kamath via twhirl
In more stable times I have said that I would pay $10/mo for a twitter w/o rate limits. So I'd probably pay $20/mo for a stable twitter w/o rate limits - Sean Reiser
Not a chance. I don't think I would even pay $20/year. Uptime is something that should be expected. - Bob
No way I'd pay $20 a month for twitter. It's fun, but not that fun. I pay $25 per year for a pro account on flickr, so maybe $20 a year for twitter. - John Wright
No, because most likely my friends wouldn't pay for it and then it wouldn't be any fun. - Eric Florenzano
Funny how someone always proclaims that they would just build their own. Really? Your time is worth that little? How much do you make an hour? How many hours would it take you to build, promote and support your own version of twitter? Who would you have to talk to on "your" version? - Lon
Yes. I would pay a yearly fee for a "pro" account. - Lon
I think $20 is way overpriced for what Twitter does. - Gadiel Rivera
I'd pay for Twiter pro, but $20 p/month would be too much, considering what Flickr charges. - jjprojects via twhirl
Flickr only charges $24.95/year for a pro account. I think that would be enough. - Morton Fox
This is a classic collective action problem. If enough people decided to move to Pownce or Jaiku or some other platform, they could do it for free. Weirdly, the internet seems to be failing at one of its chief promises: solving the collective action problem. - mrshl
No thanks. With a pro account you'd get? Filesharing, storage, uptime, more robust features...sounds nothing like Twitter! - Bryan Landers
I would not pay anything for it. There are too many other free services. - wrecks
I would pay for an open protocol to be developed for collaborative messaging - Jonathan Beckett
