Flickr now offers Public Domain and CC0 designations | Hacker News Reader

Flickr now offers Public Domain and CC0 designations

blog.flickr.net

150 pointsdanso31 comments

Props to Flickr for the change, and a shout out to the woman who brought the issue to their attention, librarian Jessamyn West: https://medium.com/message/why-spacex-s-photos-are-now-publi...

Jessamyn also invented the warrant canary. She is rad.

Just publicized, did not invent! But thank you very much.

It seems like there've been a crop of small sites trying to build in a "public domain stock photography" niche (http://www.pexels.com/, https://stocksnap.io/, and https://unsplash.com/ to name a few). I wonder if this will kill them off. :-/

Right now http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons (where I usually head to look for creative commons photos) lists zero public domain images.

Marc from StockSnap.io here! We honestly couldn't be happier that Flickr is doing this and we'll be sure to add their CC0 photos to our repository.

I have no idea why it didn't even occur to me that the sharing went both ways - totally makes sense now. :)

The benefit of these niche sites is the high level of quality. With Flickr, you'll need to sift through a lot of not so great photos.

> I wonder if this will kill them off.

Absolutely NOT. Quite the opposite I think. Using Flickr now pexels, stocksnap, unsplash etc.. will be able to cherrypick the best and highest quality photos from thousands useless on flickr.

The main reason I am using unslplash.com and other sites is the quality of photos. The other day I tried to use a CC photo from flickr I've spent most of my time just searching for a good quality photo.

Maybe some day, Flickr will actually start to care about CC a bit and log licence changes from CC licences to other licence. Current workflow allows photographers to revoke these CC licences after a while and this effectively prevents many people from using CC pictures because nobody wants to be sent to trial because he's used CC pictures with correct attributions that have mutated to All Rights Reserved suddenly.

This sucks. (ramblings of an old fotopedian)

Hit the Flickr URL with Archive.org, which should capture both the image, date+time, and the CC license present at time of archive. The Wayback Machhine has been used in court before, so precedent does exist.

javascript:void(open('//web.archive.org/save/'+encodeURI(document.location)))

When building www.everydaydreamholiday.com we cached and screenshot all the external images used (never build a scale solution because we never, um, scaled).

Interestingly, we let the photographers know as well, for a variety of reasons including the possibility they had set CC unintentionally. Most were grateful - we woke up one morning to an irate barrage from one photographer who had uploaded his image to Wikipedia without appreciating what that meant. We just changed the photo we used, and sent him a link to the Public Domain Photo on Wikipedia and a dozen other sites he might want to contact who were also using it. He apologised immediately, which was neat.

Given the amazing images available under CC (even for commercial use), it frustrates me when websites try to steal protected images and get away with it. If I can find a CC Commercial Use image of marshmallows toasting over lava in Guatemala [1], you can find a fully legal image of a sunset.

[1] http://everydaydreamholiday.com/2013/01/24/pacaya-volcano-an...

I've been wondering how Aviate identify and curate their lovely background images.

They all come from Flickr... but not sure what groups they'd be following, or search parameters they'd be using to narrow it down.

Prior to this change... I presume they would be restricted to CC-attribution?

Only about 10 years too late?

Is it because Elon Musk made all SpaceX media Public Domain?

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150322/07190730399/elon-...

I don't like it. There might be appropriate circumstances for public domain designations, but I think it seems much more attractive to laypeople than it should. Most people should probably stick to licensing their artistic work with something resembling one of the creative commons licenses.

It's always been possible to designate an image to the public domain on flickr, by pasting a designation into the description, but this gave it a level of overhead that I think discouraged people who hadn't thought about it much to avoid it.

Edit: This is getting downvotes, which I'm not sure I understand, but I'll assume it's because I didn't explain the problems with public domain designations. If there are other reasons, I'd appreciate a comment explaining them.

IANAL, but as I understand, there's some debate over whether works can be committed to the public domain at all. This makes some individuals, and a lot of big companies, hesitant to make use of anything with a public domain designation. Most people who try to commit something to the public domain rather than picking a popular non-restrictive license do so in effort to remove all obstacles to people using it, without realizing that there might be more obstacles with a public domain designation than a CC-BY license.

If I am uploading historical photographs that are in the public domain, I should absolutely have an easy way to mark them as such. Not everyone uses Flickr like Instagram to share the last neat thing they saw on the street.

OK, I overlooked this use-case.

Yeah I think you may be focusing on the "creative art" aspect of this and less on other use cases. My mom is a retired photographer and she loves seeing other people use or repurpose (and yes even sell) some of the pictures she takes. In public libraries we want a way to share images the widest way possible and don't always have our own space to do that.

I get that you're concerned that people don't understand the public domain, but I think the response to that is more (and better) explanations about what it is and why it's important, not disallowing people access to tools that they want on a platform they use.

Which is a case where she should use CC0 and not the public domain marking.

Don't forget to put them in the Internet Archive!

dublinben, do you have any public domain photos of nuclear bomb test explosions?

Your concern is why CC released CC0.

They don't seem to be ambivalent about people using it.

Actually I have no problem with CC0, as matt4077 explained in a sibling comment, it seems pretty solid. I'm just concerned that people who aren't that interested in licensing but want to make their work as available as possible will choose the public domain option (intended for photos whose copyrights have expired) over the CC0 option.

Sure. I was trying to point out why people might take issue with your comment. CC0 appears in the headline and URL, and one of the early paragraphs of the link says this:

But we’ve heard from our community that we’re missing two important designations: Public Domain and Creative Commons 0 (CC0). Many members of our community want to be able to upload images that are no longer protected by copyright and correctly tag them as being in the Public Domain, or they want to release their copyright entirely under CC0.

So it was odd for you to not mention CC0 at all in your comment.

(I've edited the last paragraph in an attempt to be less abrasive)

Or, presumably, which were never copyrighted as in the case of "A United States government work is prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties." http://www.usa.gov/copyright.shtml

It's probably also worth noting in this discussion that (as per the referenced link) subjects in the photos may have privacy or publicity rights for photos used for commercial (non-editorial) purposes.

Contractors that prepare works for the US government can own copyright, and since most of the work for the government is now contracting, this doesn't buy a ton.

CC0 = good. PD = bad.

PD, particularly for visual works, is something people often think is the case, but really isn't. It's not possible in a number of countries to give up copyright. In others, even when you can, you have moral rights.

If you are using PD for visual works, you might as well just tell people they can't use it.

> It's not possible in a number of countries to give up copyright

So, what status does IP have when its copyright expires?

It varies pretty wildly. In plenty it can become public domain this way, but that takes roughly forever.

In particular, something taken during our lifetime will almost certainly not become public domain until well after we are dead.

Public Domain, ist's just not possible to let go off Rhodes rights earlier.

The CC0 has, iirc, a 'rescue' clause in it that specifies the license's intent to retain the least amount of rights possible.

A much larger problem with any free license is that it's usually impossible to check a work's complete provenance. I. e. whoever attached the license might not actually be the creator.

Being able to put in things in PD depends on your jurisdiction. In some countries, the original author has certain rights or responsibilities that can't be signed away. But in the USA it's pretty uncontroversial (as far as I know).

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