Flickr takes flak for selling Creative Commons photos as wall-art prints

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/02/flickr-creative-commons-photos-wall-art

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Flickr’s latest business model – selling wall-art prints of more than 50m images shot by its community of photographers – has sparked a debate around Creative Commons licensing.

The Yahoo-owned site will keep all the revenues from sales of prints based on photos shared to Flickr using a Creative Commons “commercial attribution” licence, which allows commercial use. However, it is sharing 51% of the revenues from sales of prints licensed directly from members with those photographers.

Why is this controversial? Not because it’s illegal. Flickr’s Bernardo Hernandez told the Wall Street Journal that the licences “are designed for the exact use case that we’re enacting through our wall-art product”, while the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s intellectual property director Corynne McSherry confirmed that “it doesn’t appear that Flickr is doing anything wrong”.

Flickr had already published a separate blog post on 26 November about the new feature. “We believe it’s possible to build a healthy and profitable marketplace for photography with the ownership of intellectual property as a core tenet of that marketplace,” explained the company.

The Wall Street Journal polled 14 affected photographers and found a split in their views: eight did not object to having their Creative Commons photos sold without getting a cut of the revenues, while six did object.

The controversy comes from the fact that to prevent their photos being sold as wall-art prints, photographers have to use a different non-commercial Creative Commons licence, even if they’re happy for smaller companies to use their work.

“As a photographer, I now have to choose whether to prevent people from using my photos, or prevent Yahoo from selling them. I can’t have both,” wrote veteran web designer and author Jeffrey Zeldman on his blog.

“I want people to use my photos. That’s why I take them. I want that usage to be unencumbered. That’s why I chose a Creative Commons license. Some of the publications and businesses that use my photos make no money at all. Others make a little something. I don’t care either way. That’s why I chose a Commercial Attribution license. The license makes my work available to all publications and products, whether commercial or non-commercial. Fine with me.

But Yahoo selling the stuff? Cheesy, desperate, and not at all fine with me. I pay for a Flickr Pro account, and am happy to do so. That’s how Yahoo is supposed to make money from my hobby.”

Flickr has a long-established community of amateur and professional photographers, including some who’ve used it as a platform to move from the former to the latter group.

The danger for the company is that the new wall-art store risks damaging its relationship with those photographers, at a time when there is competition from sites like 500px.

“It’s hard to imagine the revenue from selling the prints will cover the cost of lost goodwill” said Stewart Butterfield, who co-founded Flickr with Caterina Fake before selling it to Yahoo in March 2005. Both left the company in 2008.

Flickr stagnated over the next few years in the face of competition from services including Facebook and Instagram, but was revamped under Yahoo’s chief executive Marissa Mayer in May 2013.

“We hope you’ll agree that we have made huge strides to make Flickr awesome again,” she wrote at the time. While its new wall-art store may be perfectly legal, if more creators view it as distinctly un-awesome, Yahoo may need to rethink its approach.

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