Flickr plagiarised...How the good won
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
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Flickr allows users to upload their works and organize them with tags, and while it is possible to make your photos available only to certain viewers and protect them with a copyright, Flickr encourages its users to make their images freely available to everyone via one of six Creative Commons licenses, which outline various definitions of free fair use.
Licenses such as these, no matter how forward-thinking and brilliant they may be, rely on the central tenet that people will actually obey them. Until this whole saga began to unfold, I was seriously doubting that anyone anywhere would ever be able to adequately police licensed content (especially semi-small-time thefts such as these) on the Internet. In this case, my photos weren't even licensed with Creative Commons—they were filed under the traditional and uber-restrictive "all rights reserved" copyright, which allows for no usage of my photos anywhere without my specific permission. Clearly, even this did nothing to deter the plagiarist in question. So what did put the kibosh on this guy's cyber thievery? The rapid mobilization and deployment of a force I hadn’t even considered: the blogmob
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Licenses such as these, no matter how forward-thinking and brilliant they may be, rely on the central tenet that people will actually obey them. Until this whole saga began to unfold, I was seriously doubting that anyone anywhere would ever be able to adequately police licensed content (especially semi-small-time thefts such as these) on the Internet. In this case, my photos weren't even licensed with Creative Commons—they were filed under the traditional and uber-restrictive "all rights reserved" copyright, which allows for no usage of my photos anywhere without my specific permission. Clearly, even this did nothing to deter the plagiarist in question. So what did put the kibosh on this guy's cyber thievery? The rapid mobilization and deployment of a force I hadn’t even considered: the blogmob
read more digg story
