Yahoo is selling Creative Commons Flickr images but isn't sharing profits with owners

[Justin Kahn]

Changes have been made over on Flickr some users aren’t too happy about. Yahoo has decided that it can sell canvas prints of creative commons images belonging to users without sharing any of the revenue. 

Flickr was already selling non-commercial use images, but was splitting revenue with the owners at a rate of 51%. While creative commons images can be used for free for a number of reasons, there are some user that don’t like the idea of Yahoo making a profit from them. In many cases, these images are used for media purposes by third party companies, not directly being sold by Flickr.

It appears that Yahoo isn’t in violation of any law by offering up the $50 prints, and users that don’t like Flickr’s new creative commons marketplace can simply opt out. Users can switch their images to non commercial licenses to stop them from being picked up by Flickr, but the issue is that those images are now unavailable for the intended end user as well.

Known as Flickr’s Wall Art collections, it is still too early to tell how much of an overall effect the creative commons art sales will have on the service as a whole. While there are likely a large number of users that are impartial to the move, there seems to be some Pro users that don’t like the idea and may try to move to a new service (or something along those lines) because of it.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/59028-yahoo-selling-creative-commons-flickr-images-but-isnt.html

 

[Bobs Yer Uncle]

As it's been reported here, this certainly seems like just a really Big Jerk move by Yahoo. How very Neo-Liberal of them!

Thomas Picketty empirically demonstrates in his seminal work "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", the accelerating trend is to ensure that r>g (or "returns exceed growth"). Institutionalization of policy & practices which perpetuate this imbalance ensures that ever greater concentrations of capital are distributed across ever smaller subsets of the population.

So look for a lot more of this kind of thing to come in time. And of course, Kiddos, don't ever forget ....

Welcome to Dystopia: Where We're Building A Brighter Tomorrow!
(YOU don't get to VISIT the Bright Parts, of course!. But at least you will be granted the satisfaction of knowing that you PAID for all of our glorious construction! Now, quit your gawking & get back to your labors. NOW!)