Should Flickr Do More to Promote Creative Commons?
Yahoo's giant photo sharing site Flickr launched a new search interface this morning and it looks great - but searching for Creative Commons (CC) licensed photos remains buried at the bottom of the Advanced Search options. Flickr is the world's largest repository of photos using CC licenses, a system whereby creators can communicate various conditions for reuse of their creative work without requiring their further permission. Despite that, there's a lot more that Flickr could be doing to promote Creative Commons.
When Creative Commons is promoted, so too is creativity, collaboration and innovation. Users may not be so interested in that, though, as is evidenced by the distribution of use of the CC options for publishing on the site - the most popular CC licenses on Flickr are the most restrictive ones. What do you think: should Flickr be doing more to promote Creative Commons?
To chose a CC license as the default for your photo uploads, you have to scroll down towards the bottom of your privacy settings page. Searching for CC photos requires that you scroll to the very bottom of the Advanced Search page or start at this page. There would be a whole lot more CC photos on Flickr if those options were given better placement on the site. In 2006 13% of the photos uploaded to Flickr were given a CC license; today that number is 4%. Flickr is much bigger and now includes the perhaps more cautious former users of Yahoo Photos as well. Only about 1% of the photos on Flickr can be used in a commercial setting (like this blog) even with attribution given; otherwise, explicit permission is needed. That's a real loss.
More collaboration equals more creativity equals more communication equals a better world - and more photography for Flickr. It certainly seems in their interests to promote CC more as well.
What do you think? Should Flickr do more to promote Creative Commons or ought we simply be grateful for everything they've done already?
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Best way to promote creative commons -- give creative commons photos a higher weight when it comes to making the Explore page, and only feature creative commons photos on the Flickr blog.
Even better, have the default "explore" functions on the site only show creative commons images, and require people to click for the "full" explore if they want one with all-rights-reserved pics, too.
You do either, or both of those things, and you'll see a lot more photographers using a license like by-nc-nd, or maybe more open than that.
Couple of legal issues tripping up Flickr...
1) Yahoo cannot make liberal Creative Commons the default license since they themselves are using the EXIF data in each photo to throw advertising against ( Pics taken with Nikon camera cause ads for Coolpix ).
2) I talked to the guys from CC at SXSW and asked about Flickr and CC zero, they said the laws are different in every country on earth and Public Domain license impossible to legally enforce worldwide.
P.S. I don't see CC zero or public domain assign to the original content, or the comments people write, published by RWW, in fact it says "© 2003-2009 ReadWriteWeb" at the bottom of every page.
"Practice what you preach"?
Yes, of course Flickr should do more to promote CC. :-) (I work for CC.)
Flickr's new search interface does look great, and it does clearly display the CC filter in effect if you chose one via Flickr advanced search, so full credit and thanks to Flickr.
Todd, I'm not sure I understand your (1) but re (2) the point of CC0 is to get as close to the public domain as possible, worldwide. See http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0 for details.
Posted by: https://creativecommons.net/ml/
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August 4, 2009 12:23 PM
I'm with Todd. Where's the license on this page? :)
When I had my photos set to CC licenses on Flickr, the people who wanted to use them were invariably businesses who were frankly being too cheap to buy stock photos. That is, they don't do it out of goodwill for the community or a wish to promote good images or me as a photographer - it's merely a way to save a buck. This is when I turned them back to All Rights Reserved and left a note on my page to people to ask if they wanted them, so I could see where they were going and approve on a case-by-case basis.
You wouldn't believe how often I see people creating derivative work and crediting their source as "Deviant Art" or "google" or "Flickr," instead of a person. Having worked for not one but two different startups in the past who really depend on CC licenses and derivative works as a core value, I am passionate about the subject and do see potential for it. However, if any criticism should be made, it's that there isn't enough being done to educate people on how to USE and ATTRIBUTE images with a CC license.
If you really want to get a good look at how little people get about licensing and attribution, take a gander through Tumblr some day. (This isn't a dig at Tumblr, by the way, just the folks using it.) It's a constant stream of re-posts from around the web, many of which are NOT licensed to be used elsewhere, and you're lucky if people even put a click-through back to the original.
We all need to wake up and do better.
Many Flickr users don't realise their images cannot be used on Wikipedia (as a good example of valuable reuse) without allowing for commercial use (which while not commercial, Wikipedia requires).
Just to clarify what mattlane said, the only Flickr images acceptable on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons are those licensed under CC-BY (Attribution) or CC-BY-SA (Attribution-Share Alike).
I completely wish that they'd make it easier to search for creative commons photos. As a blogger, I'm constantly looking for photos to illustrate my blog posts and love that I can find creative commons photos on flickr that only require attribution. I'm sure if they made this functionality more obvious that more would use it.
Promote Creative Commons especially on photos is really a great to do with Flicker.Most of the users,especially the bloggers really need this.
Thanks for creating this post, and letting me know the new updates.
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I would be happy if Flickr was doing more to PROTECT users from infringement - both CC & copyrights.
Posted by: Kevin Donahue
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August 4, 2009 2:25 PM
Answering the P.S. above would be good
""I don't see CC zero or public domain assign to the original content, or the comments people write, published by RWW, in fact it says "© 2003-2009 ReadWriteWeb" at the bottom of every page.
"Practice what you preach"?""
Re CC on RWW - that's something we have been discussing for some time. We like CC a lot and write about it here frequently. It's complicated by the fact that we are a business, whereas the content owners on Flickr are almost all acting as individuals and not publishing for commercial gain. This is, after all, what we do for a living. I would not argue that commercial photographers should all publish all their content under a CC license, but I do think that a site for mostly amateur photographers ought to encourage it more.
How's that for an answer? We're still trying to figure it out.
I Agree, it needs to be easier, like http://www.clubdistrict.com
Nightlife Simplified!! But flicker is the most popular
Another reason why Flickr isn't promoting CC too much is that they have a partnership with GettyImages. Selected Flickr photos get chosen for a commerical Getty pool. Doesn't mind if they are CC or not - then the license gets changed to "All rights reserved" in any case. So I think it would be hurting Getty quite a bit if their partner offers too many high quality images for free.
I think that's a reasonable answer, and a lot of thought SHOULD go into deciding a license for your original content. I imagine that if you set your writing to anything that allowed commercial use, it'd immediately end up on stock writing sites, covered in ads, which might be undesirable to you.
I think there are a lot of pro bloggers out there who would say that because their blog hasn't got ads on it, it's not commercial in nature. The reality of it is that many people who write a serious blog do so to gain popularity in niche communities so that they can make business contacts, which eventually parlay into money somewhere down the line. In my eyes, that's commercial use, and I should be paid for my contribution to that blog. It's not the same as when your Aunt Martha needs a picture of two different cats to explain their differences to her Livejournal friends.
I don't think there's much anyone can do about that except stop frequenting sites that promote that kind of behavior and encourage others to do the same. I doubt it's something you can fix with a button on Flickr, unless that button (or watermark?) was included in the image embeds. "This image is not licensed for commercial use. If you see it being used commercially, please report it to xyz." Or perhaps they could incorporate some kind of reverse image search to alert you when your photos are being posted around the web. I know they do stats but it's not always that helpful and it's simple to rip a photo and re-upload it, as we all know.
Absolutely. I religiously use the CC license search, and find it a pain to get to.
What would be REALLY helpful is for Zemanta or other blogging plugins to have a CC filter!
Whether or not Flickr ought to be pushing CC is a debate worth having. I think it'd be great if they did but I don't think it's evil if they don't.
What I DO think they need to do, and wish they would do, is improve usability of CC features. I need that to do what I do; if someone comes up with a better way for me to find the CC images I want, I'll go search there, and THEY can get the ad revenue. ;-)
very thanks for article
While I agree that flickr could do more to promote creative commons, I don't think it would mean more people would allow commercial use of their images.
Most people realize that sites which have advertising or other revenue should have a photo budget to pay for photos whether they find them on flickr or Getty (or any other similar site).
I've dealt with so many sites which pay their editors, writers, and tech staff, but say they don't pay for photos. And frankly I'm tired of it.
I will change some photos to a non-commercial CC if I'm asked for wikipedia, but I don't give them my best photos because then they are more like to be used by sites which should pay me for them (and that doesn't even get into as was mentioned above the sites that just rip off my photos).