Too Damned Cool

[pecunium]

Barack Obama has a Flickr account.

It violates the rules of flickr (I very much doubt he took each of the more than 50,000 images on the account), but no one is going to shut it down (which they can be damned finicky about doing to other people).

The man has an amazing touch, and I'm hoping he keeps it up.

Comments

[txanne.livejournal.com]

And he Creative Commonsed them, too. Eeee!

[mary-wroth.livejournal.com]

That is awesome. I'm so adding him as a contact.

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

A friend on the Flickr team says it's providing interesting technical challenges.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Sheer volume?, both in terms of photos and views?

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

Yes, they are learning new things about caching.

[geekchick]

I'd believe it; yesterday I tried hitting up the candid set from Tuesday night and got repeated "hang on, we're overwhelmed at the moment" errors.

[julieannie.livejournal.com]

I know. I tried forever to view them yesterday.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

The numbers, and what I glanced over, make it look pretty much unedited. Somebody might have filtered out dreadful technical errors, but that's all. And that feels very daring.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

He's also got a blog, syndicated at changedotgov.

The man is on the ball, and he's hitting the ground running. Instead of sitting in the wings for three months, waiting for the current administration to mess up things for him, he's covering all possible ground so that the moment he steps into office, he'll be fully in charge.

Colour me impressed.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

If he has permission, is it ok? I read their rules, and it sounds like there might be some leeway in it IF he has permission.

#
# Do upload content that you have created.
Respect the copyright of others. This means don't steal photos or videos that other people have shared and pass them off as your own. (That’s what favorites are for.)

So if he IS respecting the copyright (has their permission) is it ok??

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

No. The only thing flickr cares about is who took the photo, not who has the right to use it. They say four times, in the ToS, if you didn't take it, you can't use it.

To some extent they let that slide for photos of the account owner (and, so it seems, for couples sharing an account, though that's a ToS violation too), but only so far. I have a contact on Flickr who is a model, and she had about 25 percent of the photos in her stream taken by other people.

Someone took offense (not the photographers, they were linking to her stream) and she was deleted.

But he was a candidate for president, and is not the president elect, soon to be the president. I think they will let it slide.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

I didn't know they were that annoying about things. Jeeze, a lot of stuff in mine and DAn's, can't remember who took what.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

By, and large, the only worry is that someone will complain. I warned a friend to not use political shots of others, because someone (she's a B-list blogger) might decide to screw with her.

People who post nedt-found nudes, and porn, get taken down a lot, because they offend people (which is why filtering is so important; not to keep purloined pictures up, but to defend against people who take offense).

There is a group on how to avoid problems (it's where I found most of this)Adult Members; How not to get deleted.

I figured CC, public domain, fair use, etc. would be ok... it's not.

A lot of it, I think, is to avoid DMCA fines.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Oh... and they mean it when they say, "Nothing you didn't take".

If they can't know (say I lend my camera to people... the exif data is all going to be the same) then you are ok.

But using flickr to store photos you don't want on your computer (as people say they do), no good. If you get a complaint flickr can (and will) look at all your photos, even the "private" ones, and if they find things which the account holder didn't take, they will delete the account.

The discussion board in that group is full of deleted accounts talking about what they thought would prevent that sort of thing

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Seems to me that it would be, pretty much. But then, I take a rather liberal view of "copyright" matters, along the lines of Tom Digby's -"If you make any money off of it, I deserve a reasonable share'"- (though I'd say "money or egoboo"). Pretty obviously, he probably didn't take the pictures in which he appears, but it seems to me that stuff like this is too trivial to bother with, along with complex concepts about what rights the subject of a photograph ought to have over its use. Probably it'd be a good idea for anyone posting such a collection to open it with a Disclaimer something like "I didn't take all the photos in this shoebox of Family Snapshots, but don't remember who all else might have taken some of them." Flickr's Rules seem to be geared to an Artistic Quality level that would be silly to apply here if the few examples I've seen are any guide.

[mitejen.livejournal.com]

This is so awesome, I'm totally adding him as a contact. I don't care if he's never even personally visited the site, it's just too neat not to take part in.

I was screwing around on flickr the other night and found Johnny Depp's kid's pictures on there, just candid shots of her hanging out with friends and being a very young emo teenager. Very cool.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Cool. What's the account?

[mitejen.livejournal.com]

You know, I think I jumped the gun--this person might just be a huge fan of the two of them and invented a name---the only name for Depp's kids I can find are Jack and Lily, and Vanessa Paradis doesn't seem to have any kids on her own. (http://flickr.com/photos/hyrlamiranda_music/)

[sethg]

And he lists Godfather I & II among his favorite movies.

Which explains why he chose Rahm Emmanuel as his consigliere.