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Flickr Censors A Photographer's Plea

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the who-owns-what dept.

Bananatree3 writes "Popular Icelandic photographer and art-student Rebekka Guoleifsdottir has been targeted by Flickr for posting a plea for help in a theft case involving an online retailer selling copycat art. She requested that people send the retailer letters concerning the issue, and in response her original post was promptly deleted. It is still ironically available on Yahoo cache. In the end it appears that the retailer had been duped by a rogue art dealer under the title "Wild Aspects and Panoramics LTD". However, Flickr seems to have overstepped its bounds in deleting this post." This whole case brings back up the messy issues surrounding content ownership in this strange new world of a services based internet.

1 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Overstepped??!! by garett_spencley · · Score: 0, Troll

    While I certainly sympathize with the photographer I don't think Flickr has any obligation in the matter what-so-ever. She took advantage of a free service that they offer in order to gather support for her cause. If anything, she was the one who overstepped her bounds. Of course I think her motivation may have been to warn other Flickr users. In that case it's more of a grey area. She could have gone through Flickr admin/mod/whatever channels first.

    Either way I don't see this as being an issue of "right vs. wrong". She doesn't pay Flickr anything so far as I can assume. She can't expect anything from them. They have the right to do whatever they want. And yeah if they piss off the market the market may decide to find an alternative, but that's their problem and has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not they "overstepped their bounds". Their bounds are basically they can do whatever they want with their property. They can't resell or claim ownership of your work (as that is not their property), but they can sure as hell refuse to host it on their servers. If you've got a problem with that go pay $5 / month for some cheap web hosting or sign up for a free blogger account, post your story there and submit it to /. where you're sure to get a massive amount of support (;p)