Tiffany B. Brown

a mish-mosh of stuff

Recommended: Jeremy Keith’s “Lock up your data”

You’ll need to read the Flickr forum thread for some context regarding Jeremy’s post, but Jeremy’s point is a good one:

As sites like Flickr and Last.fm move from having early adopters into the mainstream, this issue becomes more important. What isn’t clear is how the moral responsibility should be distributed. Should Flickr provide clearer rules for API use? Should Google index less? Should the people publishing photos take more care in choosing when to mark photos as public and when to mark photos as private? Should developers (like myself) be more cautious in what we allow our applications to do with the API?

I personally agree with pasmateRs (and because of his sheer pragmatism Pisco Bandito): It’s more of a Flickr API issue, and maybe even a Google issue. But as more sites release APIs, questions of ‘When does display or use cross into copyright violation?’ and ‘How can we design systems that give users the most control over how their information is repurposed?’ come to the fore.

Also worth reading

  • http://www.grandmasterdesign.com/ Jason W.

    You know I wasn’t paying attention to this post, but then I started paying a lot of attention to this post. What’s always gotten me about the whole “don’t mess with my flickr image” argument is the whole tin-foil hat attitude … as that Pisco Bandito person said the only true way to protect your image is to mark it as private or not post it at all. Anything that can be viewed online can be stolen, API’s be damned.

    Unless everyone wants to start watermarking their images, I suppose. Still could be taken, obviously.

    People get very snippy over their cat pictures.

  • http://www.grandmasterdesign.com Jason W.

    You know I wasn’t paying attention to this post, but then I started paying a lot of attention to this post. What’s always gotten me about the whole “don’t mess with my flickr image” argument is the whole tin-foil hat attitude … as that Pisco Bandito person said the only true way to protect your image is to mark it as private or not post it at all. Anything that can be viewed online can be stolen, API’s be damned.

    Unless everyone wants to start watermarking their images, I suppose. Still could be taken, obviously.

    People get very snippy over their cat pictures.

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