On 23/01/2008, David Monniaux <David.Monniaux(a)free.fr> wrote:
I think there is one important issue that precludes
widespread reuse by
responsible people: we make no warranty whatsoever about the correctness
of the licences - and it's to be expected, since the licensing
information is filled in by users on which we have no a priori control.
When people buy photographs from Getty and so on, they not only buy a
photograph but also some kind of insurance that they can safely use
them. If they get sued for copyright infringement, they will say "hey, I
bought this photograph from Getty, who certified that it was legit! sue
THEM!". But do they want to say to a judge "well, we downloaded this
picture from this site, where it was uploaded by somebody called
tiptop35 who said it was in the public domain".
Yeah. OTOH, Flickr's CC search is a good enough source for many
reusers, and they can't guarantee it either. So we can be at least
that useful. If we had a search even as good as Flickr's tag search
...
- d.