[cc-licenses] Flickr photos with revoked licenses

Erik Moeller eloquence at gmail.com
Fri Apr 28 21:13:11 EDT 2006


On 4/28/06, Daniel Kinzler <daniel at brightbyte.de> wrote:
> This is a serious problem in Flickr's interface - a change in license
> terms should at least be publicly documented. It should also be made
> clear to the users that a license once given can not be revoked.

Their Creative Commons interface is very broken. There's no reference
to Creative Commons in the normal Flickr upload form at all. To even
see these preferences, you have to go to your Account page and select
"Photo licensing". There you have the choice to set the license for
_all_ your future uploads, or _all_ your past uploads.

So users are practically encouraged to "relicense" all their photos if
they're no longer happy with their CC license. This leads to obvious
problems when someone who has made hundreds of uploads changes them
all from CC-BY to "All rights reserved". (It also means that Creative
Commons photostreams often contain mislabeled copyrighted conent,
because there's no easy way for users to turnn off the CC licensing
when uploading something that is _not_ CC.)

I just saw that the CC FAQ explicitly warns that CC licenses are not revocable:
http://creativecommons.org/faq#What_if_I_change_my_mind?

So I emailed Stewart Butterfield from Flickr and asked him to add a
note to this effect to the retroactive license change form. Getting
them to make more substantial improvements to their Creative Commons
integration is probably going to be harder.

Erik



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