Yahoo! plays favorites when it comes to political images on Flickr?

Posted Aug 21st 2009 2:30PM by Brian White
Filed under: Products and Services, Yahoo! (YHOO)

Should political satire be censored by one of the largest photo-sharing websites on the planet? Although several political satires of a former president are easily findable, one was removed due to what Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) thinks is "copyright infringement." Regardless of your political stance, what does Yahoo! think it's doing by trying to be an information gatekeeper for material on its main photo site? Ever hear of fair use?

This irritated Valleywag's Ryan Tate, who said "a transformative political satire" should not be deleted by Flickr based on some loose understanding by Yahoo! and the folks who comb through Flickr's images looking for infringing and offending photos to delete from the site.

From what appears here, Yahoo! must have a noncentralized or very subjective stance on what can and cannot appear on its site. Again, playing gatekeeper will ultimately cause loyal consumers to revolt and go elsewhere. Another example is the Google Voice scenario Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) has played out with its iPhone App Store.

Again, a company playing gatekeeper against consumer demands from a product they've already bought and use. But then again, leaving the community of Flickr users able to hit the "Report Abuse" button that appears on all uploaded photos allows the actual user community to be somewhat responsible for having content deleted. Leaving the populace in charge is never fair, right?

Tags: Fair use images, Flickr, inthenews, Yahoo, YHOO

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

8-21-2009 @ 6:33PM

Dan Barnett said...

Mr. White,

I think you miss the point. The item was apparently removed over questions about copyright infringement.

"what Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) thinks is "copyright infringement." Regardless of your political stance, what does Yahoo! think it's doing by trying to be an information gatekeeper for material on its main photo site? Ever hear of fair use?"

Yahoo would leave itself liable for the copyright infringement liability if it did not remove the items and apparently leave itself open to censorship complaints from you & others if it did.

I, at least, would not care to see Yahoo become the lead defendant in ground-breaking copyright litigation for the future.