Never heard of that term before. Apparently it’s the agreement between photographer (or publisher) and human subject about picture rights and further picture use [Wikipedia explains it better].
How come?
I was reading a post about the issue were Virgin Mobile took a photo from Flickr and used it in an ad campaign. The photo was licensed under Creative Commons (CC). As you can see on the picture of the ad, Virgin Mobile fulfilled the attribution condition by properly indicating the author. What happened was that the girl showing up on the picture felt insulted (and well, her family smelt the money I suppose) and filed a lawsuit against Virgin Mobile and others.
As far as I understood, and I’m no lawyer, the one violating the girl’s rights was the Flickr user and not Virgin Mobile. It was the Flickr user who published the taken picture online under a CC license without holding the model release in his hands. Virgin Mobile made use of the picture by respecting the underlying license. But that’s just my theory.
The outcome of this lawsuit will be interesting though. Especially the piont what’s a Creative Commons license worth in a court. Supposedly the same as any other license agreement, but you never can tell.
I have a Flickr account too, meaning I publish pictures online. All of my photos are licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA and on some of them you can identify random persons, and I do not own a single model release.
Should I be concerned?
I’m not quite sure. According to the rather simple CC license text, anybody who wants to use my pictures commercially must ask for my permission first. So Virgin Mobile couldn’t just use my picture in a campaign without letting me know. On the other hand my license does allow non-commercial sharing, under certain conditions, but basically it gives me no control where my photos are going to show up.
Google now makes it very easy to embed customized Google Maps on any website you want, without signing up for a Google Maps API key: just copy&paste the provided HTML-code, provided under the “Link to this page”-link on the Google Maps interface.
On the map below you can see our yesterday’s late afternoon Flickr photo tour through Stuwerviertel here in Vienna:
One little problem:
The Google Maps iframe somehow doesn’t play very nice with WordPress’ Rich Text Editor. I wasn’t able to re-open that post because the Rich Text Editor was enabled by default. Once I had it disabled, everything worked fine again.
Update
Since most of the pictures taken at the Flickr meet-up are now online I added the Flickr-KML-link as network link to the my KML-file shown in the map above. In order to view only the pictures taken at the meet-up I had to manually limit the date to the day (add &min_taken_date=2007-08-21&max_taken_date=2007-08-22 to the KML-link).
A couple of local Viennese Flickr users are meeting up – right, only meeting up, even if it seems very trendy nowadays to call 2+ people walking around with cameras “photowalk” – however, there’s a meeting planned for next Saturday 11th August 4pm at Karlsplatz, subway exit Secession, and then later starting around 8pm at Rupps, Arbeitergasse 46.
Everyone enjoying photography and not scared by a bunch of photo-Flickr-addicts is very welcome to drop by!
Some more information has been posted at the forum threads:
The most exciting thing about those meet-ups is, it’s not about Web 2.0 evangelism. It’s about real people, users in flesh and blood meeting face to face. It’s about people who share a passion and socialized by the help of a Web 2.0 platform. Most of them don’t even know what Web 2.0 is, frankly, why should they, it’s only a marketing term. For me those meet-ups demonstrate what Web 2.0 really is about: the people who make the fancy buzzword successful.
Yahoo! is giving a lesson on how to piss of users and bring down a formerly entertaining and successful service.
I wonder how long it’ll take until the first Flickr-migration tools show up…
Due to Flickr’s terms of services it’s not allowed to embed pictures hosted on Flickr on other websites without linking back to the corresponding Flickr photo page. People who are trying to keep traffic low on their own servers usually outsource images to services like photobucket. Unlike Flickr, photobucket basically allows embedding pictures on third party sites without immediately creating a backlink, but limits photo hosting up to a certain amount of storage and bandwith usage. Once users exceed their bandwith limit, a nice little photobucket message shows up instead of the original picture.
Well, that strategy doesn’t seem so bad at all. That way photobucket sneaks free ads into other popular portals like MySpace, Facebook, Blogs, etc. and even into some user profile pages of their main competitor Flickr.
A small Flickr user meet up is announced for tomorrow afternoon. Everybody who wants to join is of course very welcome! Here is the full thread about the “organization”.
When: Sat 24th Feb, 2.30pm
Where: Südbahnhof, Markus-Löwe (in the hall)
