For the first time in four years, I’ve let my flickr pro account expire, as I still haven’t heard anything back regarding the copyright infringement case from support, despite my best efforts at getting in touch with someone — anyone — who can tell my just how they can defend having deleted images that shouldn’t have been affected by the copyright claim from Lucasfilm.
Four years, and I can’t even get an answer out of them? I know I sound like a broken record, but I’m just flabbergasted that I’m unable to even get a ‘Hey Mike, got your mail, I’ll get back to your asap and I hope this isn’t causing you too much grief’-mail.
I mean, is it really worth it for Flickr that I bitch and whine about this here, on twitter and even in real life? That I can’t conciously recommend Flickr to anyone anymore without adding a ‘but, you should also know that…’.
I love flickr.
This sucks.
Have you tried making noise on Flickr’s GetSatisfaction.com profile?
This seems like a bad joke. As a paying, not to mention loyal customer you could expect at least so much. Can we blame Yahoo? Probably not, but I’d kind of like to think so.
I’ve followed this story intermittently (via Twitter) for weeks. It’s stories like yours that compels me to make backups of all my data that is stored in the “cloud.”
I hope the boys over at Flickr pull their heads out of their asses soon and get back to you. It’s in their best interest to resolve this.
I’ve been following your posts about this, also wondering if I should continue paying for a Pro account, too.
I’m sorry to hear they haven’t replied. what the eff.
Sorry about this, Michael. I feel for ya. Let us know if/when it gets resolved.
People and companies seem to approach e-mails like they are annoying and not worth their precious time these days. My experiences with contacting people through email are getting less and less responsive, it feels like no one cares any more. What’s up with that? Guess that people are too busy with trying to keep up with their Twitter lists and Facebook accounts these days to even care. I thought technology was supposed to help us get more free time, not the other way around. Ugh. On another note, there’s always Picasa which I use.
Zenphoto is awesome, and I just wrote a handy integration plugin for it …
Yeah, but it only solves the ‘how do I store photos in an easily accessible way’, it doesn’t solve all the community features of flickr, which is what keeps me there.
That’s true. You mean community pools, community tagging, community notes and so on?
Such a thing should be open, kinda like login is with openID. Remember, you’re on flickevilr.
Well that, but also the ease with which I follow my friends and they follow me and we discover what each other upload and what others write about it, and that way discover new photostreams and so on.
It’s the serendipity of the system I’ll miss I suppose.
Switch to Zenphoto, Picasa or Smugmug or let it go. They seem to be taking copyright laws (which you broke, welcome to the 21st century) too seriously to the point where they deleted all other photos that were not even remotely owned by Locus Arts. They were probably afraid to have another bunch of lawyers-lawyers meetings from another owner.
When it comes to such incidents, a user is just a number to them. 1000 users who will be ditching Flickr over this are just a number too.
Serves you right for putting up something that belongs to george lucas.
If I were you I would double-check your pictures of Jerup do not somehow belong to Lucasfilm.
This is the issue that has always bothered me about “web 2.0” applications and other things where you essentially have someone else in charge of your content. They can delete it on a whim — as you found out. If they decide to go out of business (could happen in current climate), decide to charge more, or begin charging or etc. etc. etc.
Always archive, consider how much effort to put into something that you don’t actually control, etc.
I agree further that you should have heard from them if you followed the proper contact proceedure (as I am sure you did).
And that brings me to my last issue, so many operations simply don’t have customer service. I try to frequent those that do (specifically those that do so in my native language). Voting with our feet, err keyboards, is all we have to do.
So given your experience at Flik’r how/where will you vote next?