Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
What particularly irks me about Flickr is that
people can change the
licenses on their photos; I came across a Featured Picture on Commons
the other day which had been uploaded in December 2005, tagged as
CC-BY-SA 2.0, had been uploaded to Flickr in November 2005, but when I
viewed the photo in July 2006 the tag on Flickr was CC-NC-ND 2.0. The
worst part is that the image on Flickr has no "history" page, and the
Internet Archive doesn't have the page, so there's no way I can verify
that the image was indeed tagged that way when it was uploaded to Commons.
This all comes down to a question of proof. One needs to assume if the
use of the photograph was legal at the time that it was used that use
and all downstream uses that derive from it will continue to be legal.
The downstream user will probably need to establish the chain of
provenance in the event of a legal dispute. It would be his
responsibility to trace up the food chain to establish the freeness of
the material.
For us, we probably need to be a bit more thorough in documenting our
usage, particularly noting the date and time the material was taken.
This may require archiving a download of a status file from Flickr.
I seriously doubt proof is going to help in a situation like this.
There are so many other factors involved. Was the person who uploaded
the file to Flickr actually the copyright holder? Who was the license
granted to? Can the license be revoked? Was the uploader of legal
age to grant the license?
If someone releases something under a free license and then changes
his or her mind later, 99 times out of 100 the best solution is to
just find replacement content. It's just too much of a grey area
legally.
Anthony