I've deleted my Flickr content. All of it. I'm feeling very uneasy about Yahoo's attitudes toward copyright of Flickr users and how Yahoo's corporate policies are affecting Flickr policy. Honeymoon's over, Yahoo bitches.
Ari - any new changes in particular? or just in general?
In general, but their attention to copyright in particular has me concerned. I think they're being a bit cavalier on the Yahoo side. For instance: http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/107282/
Yes, I deleted my entire account's worth of photos. 4 years, over 2k, had a pro account 3 years, riding out this last year as a free account... all group-submitted, thoroughly tagged, many favourited by others and quite a few in explore, et cetera. I admit it was an extreme (and hard) step to take. I had lots of group involvement, lots of friends and contacts. I will miss that.
While there was a lot of things I did like about Flickr, I had a hard time dealing with the fact that only "unedited photography" was allowed in explore making all illustration and manipulated photography ineligible (unless it was HDR, tilt-shift, or just the regular heavily photoshopped images we see in explore so often), how they would delete people's accounts without warning (or recourse) with a wall of silence from the "helpful" flickr employees on the Help Forum, how they instituted content filters for countries like Germany and China way out of proportion to threat of local law problems, and yahoo has been not only using Flickr member's phtos for advertising (check your TOS) but is also openly advocating lifting your contacts' photos.
Other problems: with the integration of Yahoo!TM photos, the number of submissions has skyrocketed and what was once a sort of tight knit community vibe has become diluted - the new folk don't have the same kind of social media attitude, and it's become more of simple repository than a community. I was seeing my traffic drop a lot over the last 2 years and I blame that on sheer numbers. More worrying, though is that with the popularity of Flickr (maybe even ubiquity) and a readily available API, there are now TONS of Flickr leech sites - vanity google your user name and you will likely see your entire stream on literally dozens of other sites you didn't even know existed. It's hard enough to keep creative (and copyright) control over your Flickr photos as it is, and that kind of paranoia didn't help the diminishing sense of community culture.
I just keep seeing more and more of Flickr's culture being changed by Yahoo's culture being superimposed on it and I didn't feel lke sticking around to see what the next bullshit move was going to be. Slapping the Yahoo!TM logo in next to the Flickr logo (right where it used to say "Flickr loves you" was a symbolic move that I felt reflected the diminishing respect the corporate masters had for the users, not just as content creators, but as a creative community.
Enough.
I stopped uploading photos to flickr since that story came out about that dude who put a photo of his family on it and some company overseas (Australia if memory serves) put it on a billboard selling something. Not that any of my photos are billboard worthy anyway, but I still didn't like that. It was then that I cancelled my facebook account as well.
Call me a tin foil hat wearing freak, but I don't like giving other people rights to my images for nothing. :shrug:
EDIT:-- Here's a similar story (can't find the one I saw originally)
Advocating death penalty for all felony level offenses, going tinfoil... I like the new, curmudgeonly Big Ern. you need a hat and a cigar.
haha, I've always been a secret death penalty supporter and paranoid curmudgeon. I just don't like to talk about it. (You never know who's listening).
shifty eyes
Originally posted by: Big Ern I stopped uploading photos to flickr since that story came out about that dude who put a photo of his family on it and some company overseas (Australia if memory serves) put it on a billboard selling something.
I saw a similar story, but it was somewhere in eastern Europe. Here's yours, though.
For some reason, I'm reminded of the legal problems collage artists, such as Rauschenberg, have had with appropriating copyrighted material from corporations (Time, etc.).
It's, like, the opposite or something.
I see what you did there...
Also Warhol (who won) Jeff Koons (who lost) etc.
Yeah, the freedom of artistic license has diminished over the years for sure. Under the DMCA it's virtually nonexistant... unless you're a corporate marketeer fuck that states in the TOS of the very medium in which the content exists that any creator that uses the medium gives up their creative control.
I think the difference between a Rauschenberg collage and Yahoo using your image as aspirational media to promote their latest commercial venture should be evident even to the most slouching neanderthal art-hater.
Originally posted by: arigato the most slouching neanderthal art-hater.
Are you speaking to _me, _Sir? 
In my new graffiti application I go the other way, declaring i own the copyright of anything created with the application, but then I am saying in the copyright that you can do anything with the images, as long as its non commercial.
Setting a copyright isn't always terrible, and just because the little c exists doesn't mean you shouldn't look into exactly what they're declaring with it.
That said, the C doesn't have to exist. It is the burden of the infringer to know the copyright declarations.
Originally posted by: persist In my new graffiti application I go the other way, declaring i own the copyright of anything created with the application, but then I am saying in the copyright that you can do anything with the images, as long as its non commercial.
Setting a copyright isn't always terrible, and just because the little c exists doesn't mean you shouldn't look into exactly what they're declaring with it.
That said, the C doesn't have to exist. It is the burden of the infringer to know the copyright declarations.
...a little different from what you describe, but intellectual property is a fun read. [/nerd]
I'm not too sure how finally adopting relative positioning css is going to save Flickr's suckathon.
edit - and apparently, I can only read revived threads two posts up, before reposting the reason it is revived.
The most impressive thing to me is that you could remember the title of this thread.
believe it or not, I used search.
Lies.
Google search.
that's the ticket 