The holidays bring the amazing wonder of a fixed feed (no more raw textile markup), non-invisible pages, working search, a lifestream and some polish on the theme here and there. Hell, the about page even has my e-mail address on it, so people can go ahead and contact me directly, instead of having to go through flickr.
Now, speaking of flickr, it has now been two weeks since my sizable Star Wars collection was removed from flickr.
Lucasfilm filed a copyright infringement case with Yahoo!, telling them that the Collection I had slowly amassed over a few years, actually belonged to them, which in turn caused flickr to — in broad strokes—CTRL-A the collection and press DEL. I wake up to a flickr-mail telling me what happened, and that if I want to, I can file a counter-claim.
Of course I don’t fault Lucasfilm for filing the claim, and I don’t blame flickr for accepting the claim. In fact, I don’t really have much reason to counter-claim anything; except while the images were certainly Star Wars-related, not all of them were under Lucasfilm copyright domain…
Hm.
So I write back, asking for all the images to be made available to me, so I can sort through them and point out which ones should be left alone. But, sorry. They’re gone. Deleted. Expelled and flushed.
Yes, the collection consisted mostly of images copyrighted to Lucasfilm and I have no qualms about that. I will miss having that collection, but that’s just the images, right? What about my metadata? Titles, descriptions, tags and comments? Hell, I can’t even be sure that there weren’t images entirely unrelated to Star Wars deleted from my account; because I have no way of verifying them.
I’m sure Yahoo! has a clause somewhere stating that any and everything on flickr, including my metadata, belongs solely to them and can be used or discarded at their discretion. And you know, there’s probably a whole host of legal reasons why that’s a good idea.
Despite that, I would expect flickr to have a slightly more refined system in place for dealing with copyright claims, than merely deleting everything that seems to be related to the claim.
In any case, the bottomline is that flickr has deleted several hundreds of images from my account and I didn’t get a chance to go through them for false positives, backup my metadata (there are quite a few people I have had contact to, and I would like to retain not only those connections, but also the talks we had about for instance, the design evolution of the X-Wing) or even index the collection for any eventual counter-case.
Not only that, but despite promising ‘a timely response’, two weeks later, I still can’t get anyone at flickr to tell me how this can possibly be their best response to copyright infringement cases. How many of these do they handle every week, and this is their solution?
Really?
What happens when someone manages to fake a copyright infringement claim? Your entire flickr account disappears in a plume of smoke. Deleted. Flushed. Expelled. Shot straight into the sun. Star Wars images? Yeah, who cares? Your child’s first steps? Hope you had a backup. Wedding photos? Gee shucks…
At first I was pissed. Just from principle. That my images were deleted without objection doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in flickr. But that this is actually their system for dealing with copyright infringement claims is just amateurish. I’ve heard from others who are in the same situation, some of whom have waited even longer without hearing from the ‘senior representative’ or the ‘copyright team’.
I’m done being pissed though. Now I’m simply disappointed that not only did it happen, but for a week and a half and despite asking almost every day, I can hardly get a sign of life from flickr. I’ve been a paying member of flickr for over four years, and a staunch advocate and proponent of flickr, so somewhere, you’d think my trust was worth something?
Thanks flickr. You’re the best.
Comments are open.
Related:
Jeremy has his own squabbles with flickr.
Update:
Jan 2nd, 2009: Still no word from Flickr, despite several attempts on my part to contact them.
This made me so angry. The process doesn’t usually reveal itself, but once it does, you sure would hope it wouldn’t be like this! Imagine if eBay had a similar process for refunds…
This sadly displays one shouldn’t rely on Flickr for backups of any kind.
§5 FLICKR’S RESERVATION OF RIGHTS
“Flickr expressly reserves the right to immediately modify, delete content from, suspend or terminate your account and refuse current or future use of any Yahoo! service, including Flickr pro, if Flickr, in its sole discretion believes you have: (i) violated or tried to violate the rights of others; or (ii) acted inconsistently with the spirit or letter of the TOS, the Community Guidelines or these Additional Terms. In such event, your Flickr pro account may be suspended or cancelled immediately in our discretion, all the information and content contained within it deleted permanently and you will not be entitled to any refund of any of the amounts you’ve paid for such account. Flickr accepts no liability for information or content that is deleted.”
§6 INDEMNITY
You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Flickr, and its subsidiaries, affiliates, officers, agents, or other partners, and employees, from any claim or demand, including reasonable attorneys’ fees, made by any third party due to or arising out of your use of and access to Flickr pro, your violation of the TOS, these Additional Terms or the Community Guidelines, your violation of any rights of another person or entity, or your violation of any applicable laws or regulations.
In other words they can do what they want, and you can’t even sue them…
If you continue to be a paying member, you’re telling them you don’t mind. The best — and maybe only — way to tell a company you don’t like what they’re doing is to reduce their income.
That is really a sad story Mike, not the deletion part, we all knew that would be coming at some point, but the response from Flickr. I think this shows us we all need to be better about backing up our photos regularly. Just in case.
Yea, that is not right. I use http://code.google.com/p/onairbustour/wiki/flump to backup my pics. It uses Adobe AIR and works well. I don’t trust Flickr to “keep” my images.
I guess this is the flip-side of “the cloud” :(
When you hand over your data to someone else, they can – and will – do with it as they please.
While i agree it’s “teh suck”. I can’t really blame Flickr. U.S. copyright law is absolute bulls#$t these days. While it’s not a very nice approach, it’s much safer, and easier, for them to just kill it. Also, one would hope, that as with all important data, you’ve got it backed up somewhere. Loosing the metadata is annoying, but many of the photo management tools will let you title your images and then pass that info on to flickr, so that takes care of the biggest metadata annoyance.
I do the same thing happened in flickr with the copyright
Man oh man. I heard about this happening and prior to that wondered why everything disappear all of a sudden.
While I can somewhat understand what Flickr HAD to do, they still should’ve let you sift through the image archive to ensure you didn’t have anything in there that belonged to you.
I feel bad about this. Hoping they’ll respond to verify things.
My question is, why has nobody made a decentralized flickr clone? Basically, it’d work like this: You upload your images to YOUR hosting. Then you go tell FlickrCloneSite.com “yo! new pix are up at example.com/somewhere/omg_illegal_lucasfilm_stuffs/”. FCS then comes along, saves ONLY the thumbnails of each readable image file in that directory to its own servers, packages it all in sets, gives you the option to tag stuff, et voilà: A service that offers everything people like about Flickr (community stuff, ease of use) without the legalese nonsense of being beholden to ridiculous US laws (FCS servers could be anywhere) and the whims of mouthbreathing yahoo employees and their delete keys.
I’m amazed that nobody has made a stand-alone app that is as powerful as flickr’s organizr.
This really does blow. I’d like to — out of solidarity — to cancel my membership (or at least not pay the next time ‘round) and leave Flicr as David pointed out. Despite these kind of odd copyright cases, the truth is (at least on my part) Flickr’s been a really good $25-a-year investment for all my photos. And sure there might be a competitor that has a similar service, but just the thought of moving over several thousand photos to another service just isn’t that appealing.
Michael, I hope this was a one off, especially since I’ve been enjoying your very cool SW-related photocollections for a multitude of years now.
I’ve also been a long-time supporter of Flickr, but this has been a long-standing issue with them (and other) online photo-storage sites. It’s why, as a photographer (even though an amateur), I keep everything on my own domain and only upload small versions to Flickr’s site, and always link back to my own. I’ve seen a large number of others do this as well. I’ve seen photographers get their photos ripped off from Flickr’s site and they had a heck of a time getting anything resolved, due to the EULA.
Don’t get me wrong; I still love Flickr. It’s the best that’s out there. But there are definitely some issues.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to upload every photos on Flickr and not keeping a copy on a separate HD or DVD.
Again, I only wish they’d go after all the stolen-internet-porn posting douchebags with this much gusto.
Let’s face it! WE ALL GOT TO WAKE UP!
How can we trust big corporations with out valuable data? Like all corporations their main goal is to generate income. Did Flickr care about your metadata, discussions etc? No, they care about not being sued.
If we choose to store our valued data like photos, blogs, mail etc outside our control without backups, we’re bound to get screwed sooner or later.
Nice to see comments back on.
To the point; this is why I never really settled with Flickr, and instead has been using my Zenphoto installation (http://noscope.com/photostream/) to do what I’d have done with my Flickr account.
If I ever get a copyright claim, and since I’m storing a few beautiful Saul Bass posters that’s not unlikely, I can decide what to do. In the end I’d probably delete them, but it wouldn’t be an “oh no lucasarts are on our ass let’s delete EVERYTHING BURN IT BURN IT OH NO!” knee-jerk reaction which, as you suggest, clean sweeps even gray area pictures.
Sure, I don’t get any comments on my pictures. Then again, comments are overrated.
I agree with Redge. When I upload photos anywhere — be it my own domain, Photobucket (because I refuse to use Yahoo-anything), or a forum — there is at least one more copy somewhere else. You might want to invest in an external hard drive, so you never have to worry about this thing again.
I have a hard time understanding why a company wouldn’t at least investigate such a claim, rather than just deleting everything. It seems kind of lazy, if you ask me. But I have issues with Yahoo anyway, because in my experience their customer service is completely non-existent.
Still, I really hope that you can get them to restore things for you. I have a hard time believing that it is just “gone.” Yahoo, you never fail to disappoint me.
This is awful. I know there’s nothing you could’ve done, but I can’t help thinking that perhaps this would have been better handled if Yahoo! didn’t own Flickr?
Stupidity, but wait a minute Yes, my heart goes out to you, but I don’t trust any external host with anything I care about that’s not backed up on media in my possession.
Litigation, for the client, is like swimming in a great white shark feeding frenzy. Anything you posted anywhere will be used against you whether or not there is a legal basis for doing so. There is no equity between the powerful (lucas) and the powerless (michael). Lucas doesn’t have to protect his billions against people like you anymore than Hitler had to burn the jews, but it makes work for someone.
Star Wars is ephemera anyway and will be lost in the haze soon. You were on the right track with Uncle Stanley — you were distracted by the glitter. Let the Flickr resolution be your resolution as well. Best, Em
I was considering putting my photos online and I’d started to think about the best way to store/sort them.
I shall not be using flickr. I’ll find some light and snazzy image gallery for WordPress.
While reading through this entire saga, I can’t help to wonder why they couldn’t just set all of the offending photos to private, only visible to you, and then have you sort the issues out. sorry for your loss.