Matt Brown wrote:
On 7/21/06, Gregory Maxwell
<gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
Today, we
grab free images from sites like Flikr and don't even
contact the photographer... What a tremendous opportunity to bring in
more photographers. But it seems that, as a whole, Wikipedia is not
that interested in attracting photographers.
Whenever I use a photographer's work from Flickr or anywhere else
(CC-licensed, etc) I try and leave a comment on their photo.
Generally it's much appreciated.
I think a big mistake in our Flickr-sifting efforts is that we provide
no feedback to those whose photos we use. Perhaps just because it's
easier not to or something, but comments are encouragement, and people
who free-license stuff generally like to hear that stuff is
appreciated.
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.
Ec