A couple of days ago I saw a link on Digg’s and Reddit’s front page to one of Rebekka Guðleifsdóttira’s pictures on Flickr. Rebekka is a rather prolific Flickr member from Iceland. She’d discovered that a company called Only-Dreemin had been ripping off her photographs which they found on Flickr, and were selling prints without giving her credit nor royalties. After contacting the company and not getting a response she posted a composite picture of the stolen works on her account with an explanation of what Only-Dreemin was up to. She got a big response with over 450 comments. And Only-Dreemin seems to have gotten a lot of emails/calls from irate people trying to come to Rebekka’s rescue.
Now Flickr has taken down not just the picture Rebekka posted, but they also deleted all the comments which were left by the community! This is the notice Rebekka got:
Flickr is not a venue for to you harass, abuse, impersonate, or intimidate others. If we receive a valid complaint about your conduct, we will send you a warning or terminate your account.
Wow! This is pretty outrageous. Rebekka didn’t harass the rip-off merchants at Only-Dreemin, it was the people who read her post who contacted the company (rightly so). All she did was to politely contact the company, and she didn’t go public until after they ignored her. Hasn’t Yahoo had enough bad press lately when it comes to censorship? They really don’t seem to learn their lesson.
I for one am finished with Flickr. Once my subscription expires I won’t renew it again. Time to move my stuff to Zooomr.
Possibly related posts:
