Hans Across The Interwebs

Flickr allows you to change the copyright license of your photograph as often as you like. From ‘all rights reserved’ to ‘creative common’ and back again. This creates obvious problem for people reusing content based on the license a particular photograph has at the time. If it changes, your link could be broken or your printed medium might suddenly be in violation of copyright.

I’d actually wondered about that before but never made much of it, not to my credit. Thankfully, Wired now did a small write up.

Yahoo are being complete idiots about it and are basically saying: not our problem. It seems to me that anyone really believing in the CC would say “We deem it an invaluable service to our copyright holders to track which photograph had which copyright status on any given date”. It would be so easy for them to implement it as well that it just makes me sad to read what they actually said.

Creative Commons Licenses Are Permanent — Except on Flickr: “A Yahoo spokesperson says the company does not keep track of the changes to CC attributions on particular photos, and advises people who want to use CC-licensed images to keep records of their own, for instance by taking a screenshot of the originating Flickr page.”