[Commons-l] King of the FlickrLickrs

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 2/19/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 2/20/07, Pedro Sanchez <pdsanchez at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Is there a reason on why flckrlickr doesn't fill in the fields at
> > {{flickreview}} template?
>
> The template was invented only recently, and has been applied to
> FlickrLickr images even more recently. FlickrLickr images are reviewed
> & correctly licensed (they were all under CC-BY when my bot spidered
> them); CC licenses are not revocable. The justification here is that
> "Another look can't hurt"; I'm worried that it will cause Fear,
> Uncertainty and Doubt.

*Sigh*

Erik, if a Flickr user misclicked on the dropdown and selected the
wrong license unknowingly and unintentionally they did not make a
valid release under that license.  Not only would such an accidental
and uncompensated release have zero legal standing, it is terrible
from a position of ethics.

We *depend* on the goodwill of content creators for our success. We
will squander our good will by taking advantage of simple mistakes
made by people who couldn't be expected to know any better.

Furthermore, there are *many* copyright violations on Flickr.  Flickr
refuses to take complaints from third parties so it is no wonder the
accumulate.  A second human review is a good sanity check against
situations where the flickr user is not really the copyright holder.

Part of our review process thanks Flickr users for their selection of
a free licenses.  This serves three purposes: It increases our
confidence that no mistake was made, it promotes free licenses over
non-free ones, and it raises awareness of our project and encourages
people to become direct contributors.

I hope that you can see the advantages of review and will withdraw
your objections.  No one is asking you to do any work on it... and the
end result should be a healther collection of content and a larger
community. I think it's a good tradeoff for verses a tiny number of
potentially ambiguously copyrighted images that we'll lose.