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

[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