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Flickr…a bit dodgy?
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I was just wondering if anyone has looked at the Flickr terms and conditions and finds them a bit odd?http://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/utos/utos-173.html number 9 in this link?
Can anyone tell me what this means Yahoo can do with the images I up load?
ThanksNot 100% sure but it seems Flickr have been providing slideshows to news and media sites of content tagged with whatever the website featuring the slideshow want. Even if you have them marked as ‘all rights reserved’ the organisation using the Flickr API apparently get to choose what level of copyright to include in the slideshow. See the story below for an example of a newspaper using Flickr content for free to illustrate a story, breaching copyright in the process:
http://mtpt.wordpress.com/2010/01/17/flickr-the-front-page-or-an-independent-breach-of-copyright/” onclick=”window.open(this.href);return false;
Section 9b refers to Flickr from what I can tell and refers to photos you post that are visible to the Internet public
…you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Yahoo! Services other than Yahoo! Groups.
It appears to say that Yahoo has the right to display the photos on Flickr.
… the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such such Content on the Yahoo! Services solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available
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Without this Flickr would not be allowed to display your public photos to the public. They also wouldn’t be allowed to resize them or make copies (for different sizes). To me the “solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted”, means the license only applies to its use on Flickr. In other words, your photo could not be used to advertise the Yahoo Finance site.
As far as TOS go, this one is pretty Photographer friendly. I especially like the part where they say that the license only exists as long as your photos are posted on Flickr. It ends when you remove the content. A lot of sites, (especially rights-grab competitions) say the license is “perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable, unrestricted, ” – in other words, “if you submit your photo, we can do what we like with it. So screw you!”
But there is another component to all of this. Photos you post to the public on the Internet then become available to the public on the Internet. (No sh!t Sherlock). Flickr has an API which web and app developers can then use to access publicly available photos directly without going through the site. Without the API, for developers use your photo in their content they would have to manually copy the URL from the site. Because the API makes it very easy, it can be (and is sometimes) abused. You can opt out of the public API if you like http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/optout/?from=privacy.
I am not a lawyer (although I do play one on the Internet sometimes when I am bored)
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