1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
|
Yahoo had a bit of snafu this evening. I linked to it in the nightly build, but I wanted to follow up a bit. Yahoo has been pulling in a stream of all Flickr photos tagged "Wii" to display on their [Wii portal][1]. The only problem with that is that according to the terms of service on Flickr, the copyright of all Flickr photos remains in the hands of the user.
Naturally on discovering this the Flickr community promptly pwned Yahoo by uploading a barrage of anti-Yahoo photos tagged "wii," which now fill the first several pages of the Wiiportal. My personal favorite is the hand pointing up with the text "I'm with stupid." Power to the people.
As far as I can tell no one got a goatse image through which is too bad, if you have or know of a screencap of a goatse image on the front page of the Wii portal, post a link in the comments.
In numerous threads in the [Flickr forums][3] users ranted and staff attempted to set the record straight, but were somewhat hamstrung by legal requirements. Eventually Flickr team members announced they would get in touch with the Yahoo Wii team and now as far as I can tell the photos being pulled in only from the Creative Commons Attribution pool.
But of course the pwnage continues.
And the moral of the story? Yahoo probably has the rights to do whatever they want with your photos regardless of copyright restrictions you've placed on them. Here's the relevant line from [the Yahoo TOS][2]:
>"With respect to photos, graphics, audio or video you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service other than Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available. This license exists only for as long as you elect to continue to include such Content on the Service and will terminate at the time you remove or Yahoo! removes such Content from the Service."
It's been a while since I got my English degree, but I'm pretty sure the first sentence in that paragraph isn't an actual sentence -- there's no verb. But I can tell you this, one sure way to remove Yahoo's rights is to take down your photos.
It's been a rough day for Flickr, but in this case they did the right thing and so did Yahoo and so for that matter did the users, maybe Time was right after all.
[1]: http://wii.yahoo.com/photos?pg=1 "Wii Portal Photos"
[2]: http://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/utos/utos-173.html "Yahoo! Terms of Service"
[3]: http://www.flickr.com/forums/help/32752/#reply165536 "Yahoo Forums"
|
