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Yahoo!, via Flickr, to sell your CC licensed images 
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Yahoo! Is going to start to sell Creative Commons licensed images uploaded to Flickr, and keep the money.

Yahoo! isn't breaking any law by doing this, it just isn't making the service very attractive to use, especially for those likely to be interested in using a Creative Commons licensing for their images.
This doesn't impact my images as all those are copyright protected, but I know there's a number of Flickr uses here, and if you use CC then you may want to rethink the way you shre your images on Flickr.

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About twice a week, someone asks Liz West ’s permission to use one of the nearly 12,000 images the amateur photographer has uploaded to the photo-sharing site Flickr over the past decade.

Ms. West is usually happy to comply. One woman in England created notecards using her floral pictures and sent her 100 cards in appreciation, she said. Vermont Castings, a stove and fireplace maker, used one of Ms. West’s photos on its website and shipped her a small stove as a gift.

But she’s not happy about a recent move by Yahoo Inc., Flickr’s owner, to make canvas prints from the photos she and others post to the site, sell them for up to $49 apiece and keep all of the profits.

“It ticked me off that somebody else is selling them when I was giving them away,” said Ms. West, a retired writer in Boxborough, Mass., who goes by “Muffet” on Flickr.

Ms. West is among millions of contributors to the Creative Commons, an online repository of images and writings that their creators allow others to reuse and repurpose, free, under certain conditions. Artists can specify, for example, whether their works can be used for commercial purposes and ensure they receive credit in any derivative work.

More than 300 million publicly shared Flickr images use Creative Commons licenses, making it the largest content partner. Yahoo last week said it would begin selling prints of 50 million Creative Commons-licensed images as well as an unspecified number of other photos handpicked from Flickr.

For the handpicked photos, the company will give 51% of sales to their creators. For the Creative Commons images, Yahoo will keep all of the revenue.

Yahoo says it is complying with the terms of Creative Commons by selling only images that permit commercial use. The licenses “are designed for the exact use case that we’re enacting through our wall-art product,” Bernardo Hernandez, vice president of Flickr, wrote in an email.

Each canvas print will also come with a small sticker bearing the name of the artist.

A spokesman for Creative Commons, a nonprofit group formed in 2001, confirmed Yahoo is in accord with its licenses. Legally, “it doesn’t appear that Flickr is doing anything wrong,” said Corynne McSherry, intellectual-property director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

But the move upsets some photographers who supplied images to Flickr. Ms. West and others say it is the latest in a series of moves by Yahoo aimed at making money from Flickr at the expense of its large community of photographers.

Yahoo’s plan to sell the images appears “a little shortsighted,” said Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, who left the company in 2008. “It’s hard to imagine the revenue from selling the prints will cover the cost of lost goodwill.”

The Wall Street Journal contacted 14 photographers with Creative Commons-licensed works on Flickr. Eight said they didn’t object to Yahoo’s move and are happy to get additional exposure for their work. “Any amateur photographer would love to have his or her photos hanging on walls around the world,” Andreas Overland, a Flickr user in Oslo, Norway, said in an email.

Six others objected to the company profiting from their works.

“When I accepted the Creative Commons license, I understood that my images could be used for things like showing up in articles or other works where they could be showed to public,” Nelson Lourenço, a photographer in Lisbon, Portugal, said in an email. Yahoo “selling my work and getting the full money out of it came as a surprise,” he said.

A competing photo-sharing site, 500px, helps photographers sell digital copies of their work and keep up to 70% of the revenue. Only about 100,000 photos on its site of around 50 million are licensed using Creative Commons, and 500px doesn’t sell them. The site’s co-founder, Evgeny Tchebotarev, said Yahoo’s decision to sell those images violates users’ intent. Even if legal, “it doesn’t make it moral from our standpoint,” Mr. Tchebotarev said.

Another site, DeviantArt, has more than 50 million Creative Commons-licensed images and lets artists share revenue from poster sales. CEO Angelo Sotira said Yahoo’s move “shows a lack of respect and is a disservice to the notion of open distribution on the Internet.”

The vast majority of images on Facebook and Instagram, the largest photo-sharing sites, are not licensed under the Creative Commons; Facebook, which owns Instagram, hasn’t made any moves to re-sell those images.

In response to Yahoo’s move, Ms. West and two other Flickr photographers removed the Creative Commons designation from some or all of their online images so Yahoo can’t sell them. There is no other way to opt out of the program, a Yahoo spokeswoman said.

Yahoo acquired Flickr in 2004 for close to $25 million. Flickr users have been vocal about changes subsequent changes at the hands of five Yahoo CEOs in seven years. When Marissa Mayer took over in 2012, an anonymous user created a Web page with the address dearmarissamayer.com to request that she “make Flickr awesome again.”

But Ms. Mayer’s moves to revamp Flickr have irked some dedicated users. When she began offering all users one free terabyte of photo storage in 2013, she removed Flickr Pro, a $25 annual subscription for unlimited storage that was popular with avid users.

This year, the company began placing ads in photo slideshows to visitors not logged in to the site. Devon Adams, a high-school photography teacher in Gilbert, Ariz., called the ads a “jarring” intrusion into the site. Mr. Adams is one of the users upset with Yahoo for selling his Creative Commons-licensed works.

But Mr. Adams has uploaded 58,000 photos to Flickr, so feels stuck. “I’m so heavily invested in Flickr; it’s not that I can just go somewhere else,” he said.

Mark

_________________
okenobi wrote:
All I know so far is that Mark, Jimmy Olsen and Peter Parker use Nikon and everybody else seems to use Canon.
ShockWaffle wrote:
Well you obviously. You're a one man vortex of despair.


Mon Dec 01, 2014 5:49 am
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Joined: Thu Apr 23, 2009 6:11 pm
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Yahoo!/Flickr does a U-turn on selling CC images.
Which is good an' all, but I'd still check your images to see how they are protected if you use that service.

Mark

_________________
okenobi wrote:
All I know so far is that Mark, Jimmy Olsen and Peter Parker use Nikon and everybody else seems to use Canon.
ShockWaffle wrote:
Well you obviously. You're a one man vortex of despair.


Sat Dec 20, 2014 6:51 am
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