Flickr Censors A Photographer's Plea 178
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.
Rebekka's post (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Overstepped??!! (Score:5, Informative)
TOS problems with Flickr, Blogger, etc (Score:5, Informative)
So if you were, say traveling around the world and want to document it, best to use a combination like MovableType and Gallery so you retain complete control. If you are concerned about copyright I can't imagine why ANYONE would use a service provider like Google, Yahoo, etc.
Or at least use it enough to "see more here"... and refer them to your real site.
Re:Overstepped??!! (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Rebekka's post (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Overstepped??!! (Score:2, Informative)
Update 2:Flickr have acknowledged that made a mistake, and have restored _Rebekaa's blog.
Re:Is it still stealing? (Score:3, Informative)
However, most of the P2P infringement that the *IAA go after is not for profit, and often raises visibility of the artist in question, producing more sales in future.
In this case the motive was purely profit (as shown by the thousands of dollars worth of sales the artist had been able to track herself, which would be a significant portion of her own income). These are demonstrably 'lost sales' to her, as money was indeed exchanged, so the demand was there. They were also mis-attributed to another author to cover the for-profit infringement.
In the *IAA case, as the 'consumers' are often people without the money to pay at the time, who are influenced in the future to purchase when they can for things they may have encountered on P2P, while still being illegal, the ethical ground is slightly muddy.
In the latter case, of deliberately ripping off another artist's work, passing it off as your own, and making money, there is no ethical uncertainty.
Read the old
Re:Rebekka's post (Score:2, Informative)
The defense:(taken from http://www.rustylime.com/show_article.php?id=455 [rustylime.com])
"Many thanks for asking for our side of the story rather than simply offering more death threats...
In August 2006, we were contacted by "Wild Aspects and Panoramics LTD" a company based here in London, they offered to show us some imagery, that they stated would be high resolution and we would have sole reselling rights. We were visited by a salesperson from the company and we liked what we saw
Anyway 2 weeks passed, emails were sent back and forth, basic research was done by us to enable us to resell them and then the paperwork was signed and a considerable amount of money was paid (£3000.00) by us , for us to start selling these images in the form of canvas prints.
6 months later we had a letter from a law firm in Iceland, stating we were using someone's images, we Googled the claimants name, lo and behold we found we had been duped!
As requested, we immediately removed the images from the internet and destroyed any copies of the images we had.
We emailed the law firm to state we had dealt with these requests and to apologise to their client.
We took legal advice, they told us say nothing more than we had, not recommending we contact the claimant and tell her what had happened, by the way we were very keen to do that, but we were told to avoid all contact.
In the meantime we started our own investigation into the above company's contacts and sources but have since found nothing more because the telephone doesn't get answered, mobiles are permanently off and emails are getting bounced back, it seems we were conned too.
As Rebekka has now decided to make this public, we can set about explaining to her why this has happened and of course, to apologise."
Re:Ironically? (Score:4, Informative)