I had intended to call the AP today and see what sort of agreement Winer had with them regarding FlickrFan. One of our enterprising readers seems to have beaten me to it:
eye,
I was fascinated by the prospect of having AP photos on my screensaver, so I downloaded Dave’s flickrfan software. After a day or so, however, I became concerned about the copyright implications so, to assuage my fears, I decided to give them a call. The guy I spoke with said he would look into the matter. He called back about an hour later to say that he doesn’t know where Dave is getting the images, but he doesn’t believe that this is on the up-and-up. He said he’d continue to look into it, but he doesn’t think he’ll find anything. He also, in our initial conversation, asked what sort of resolution the pictures were coming in at and seemed genuinely shocked by my reply.Unless there’s some memo that didn’t get circulated at the AP, it appears that Dave is passing out their pics without their permission. If I hear anything back, I’ll let you know.
[Name Redacted]
Two things, for the record: First, I have not verified the content of the above email and make no representations as to its truth. Second, I would be very, very concerned about enabling the AP feed in FlickrFan. If there’s no agreement between Dave and the AP, simply pulling the enclosures from that feed would likely be considered a copyright infringement (and could bring with it some serious liability).
One grain of salt to add to the above email: I believe a lot of things about Dave, but I have trouble believing that he’d be so stupid as to distribute these images without permission from the AP.
UPDATE: Got some down-time and called around. After a few transfers I was told that FlickrFan is an AP Digital client, although most of the people I talked to had the same reaction cited in the email. What that means, of course, is that Dave is paying for all of us to see the photos. I didn’t get the sense that anyone I talked to really understood the repercussions of allowing thousands of AP photos to be automatically downloaded to one’s harddrive but that’s not really my concern. It appears that FlickrFan is licensed. (While posting this update I got an email from the previous emailer saying essentially the same thing.)
Dave giveth and Dave taketh away.
I hope he’s made arrangements for the FlickrFan community to be able to download and display the images via the Mac Screensaver. But I suspect he’s actually “overeaching” on the Terms of his agreement with AP.
Dave may giveth but not exponentially without any incoming revenue. Worst case the application should delete images and not just create a massive pool of AP photos on the hard drive. He should also secure the file transfer between the application and his server (static.flickrfan.org) so it’s not so easy to just download the images.
It’s better for Dave to expose the issues early rather than let him do the big demo at Yahoo and eventually have to face consequences for not understanding the AP rights. There’s no labeling of the images and his EULA doesn’t mention any restrictions for the images.
Once a jpeg is decoupled from it’s source the “metadata” regarding licenses are effectively lost. It’s like we’re going to re-visit the issues of music downloads again with licensed/protected image data.
Old dogs and a new world… just ’cause you can script it doesn’t protect you fromthe legal aspects of content.
Very nice gift while it lasted… the images are wonderful and commercial. Is FlickrFan a commercial app or does Dave have a different intent and agreement with the AP Digital?
Dave will probably never says thanks if you limit his exposure. But Dave’s like that. He’ll more likely say “Thank a lot” and mean the opposite.
The next issue are the public Flickr feeds: they contain images that a labeled on the user’s site as “All Rights Reserved” but Flickr doesn’t seem to include license info in the feed so Dave can’t lave those pictures out of the download stream and the user will get upset if they see their work displayed on an HDTV and trace the source of the infringement back to FlickrFan.
Send lawyers, guns and money. Or just pull the service back and re-think what is allowed. It will ebd up looking like Google Screen Saver where the content provider (photographers) offer their work for view.
Dave got pulled into a discussion of Flickr Photo rights at:
http://www.jmg-galleries.com/blog/2007/12/28/flickrfan-a-heads-up-for-license-conscious-flickr-photographers/
He wrote that:
I don’t think these people should be publishing feeds with enclosures of photos they don’t want people to download.
Man photographers use Flickr and label their work as “All Rights Reserved” but Flickr seems to put those images out on the public feeds without any metadata to disclose the intend “rights” declared by the photo owner.
The conversation didn’t lead to any conclusions and the “infringement” leads me to think that Flickr needs to remove the ARR photos from the public feeds or include metadata so FlickrFan can skip protected images and just download the CC licensed work and expose the “link” to the image user.
It’s a nasty mess of IP rights, limits and liabilities.
“The invoice is in the mail”.
Downloading the image doesn’t meet anyones understanding of “Fair Use”.
It’s another “Napster” moment: “Oops. We can’t just take any enclosure in RSS and use it in our apps? Really?! That’s stupid.”
But the photos are “right there”. Yes, and the photographer wants you to leave them where you find them. Flickr needs to adapt as well for ARR work.
Dave’s right about that, though… enclosures are an invitation to download. That’s what they were originally and that’s what they’ve always been.
It’s like putting your goods on the curb, with a sign that says “Free” and then pressing charges when people take the stuff home.
Just because a photographer doesn’t realize they’re licensing their photos for download or even if they don’t want to do that, they are anyway.
Then they need to take up the issue with Flick… If they tag a image as All Rights Reserved” then Flickr should NOT put that image into the RSS public feed in an enclosure. The license info gets lost in translation from Flickr through FlickrFan (or any aggregator downloading enclosures) and it’s contrary to the expectations and wishes of the photographer.
Hopefully, Dave’s FlickFan will increase knowledge of these issues. I personally think the photographer that assumes a human is behind the download is being naive and should re-think what they should expose for easy re-use. But some will go after Dave for programming an infringement and he’ll cry foul. It’s another IP mess that needs to get shaken out.
Dave sees RSS as an API for linking and re-mix anything he can access… He would of course cry foul is anyone just re-purposed his blog’s RSS and put up a “Scripting news” doppleganger web site. He’d assume the programmer would know they are “stealing” his work.
He won’t make he same assumption for photos until someone makes it clear he’s oevr reaching by assuming the enclosure allows re-use. It enbales re-use but the right must be explicitly granted to protect him.
IANAL. But the issue seem pretty clear. Respect a contents owner and seek the owner when you re-use… even via RSS.
I agree that this is Flickr’s issue, but that makes it even less of an issue for others. It’s safe to assume that if a photographer is putting their images on flickr, that it would be acceptable for end-users to access their photos that way.
If you, as a photographer, don’t want Flickr’s features… then don’t use Flickr. It’s not rocket surgery.
As you will know from keeping an “eye on winer”, he’s planning a FlickFan demo at Yahoo (owner of Flickr) and I’d expect the issues of re-purposing enclosures and the behavior of Flickr to be questioned from the audience.
I don’t see how Dave’s hack can scale much further before someone questions the right to download an enclosure if the content creator does not expressly allow the transfer. Flickr will change in ways similar to the YouTube re-engineering after the big media companies objected.
The re-use of AP photos will also likely be questioned if the issue is still open. Does Dave have the right to provide these images from static.flickrfan.org?
NOTE: The most recent image being offered is from 1/2/08… 1594.jpg
Maybe the AP feed is being “deprecated”. Maybe not.
That’s my point, though. Flickr offers images for download via RSS enclosure. Putting your images on Flickr is an expression that you are okay with your images being used in that way.
If someone doesn’t like it, they can either change flickr or stop using the service. They cannot have their cake and eat it too.
As for the feed being deprecated, I’d guess that maybe Dave bought a certain number of images (or a certain span of time) and he’s waiting before he tosses more money into it to see if he’s getting enough attention-bang for his buck.
There hasn’t been a new AP photo since 1/2. 1594.jpg is the latest image. I wonder if they shut his feed down. He’s not distributing “news” at this point. Just a library of cached images on Amazon’s S3 service.
Maybe the rss.xml file will get updated with new files. Maybe not. No word on Dave’s blog about the situation or on the FlickrFan user site.
I think you may have bragging rights to a news “scoop” at some point. No one else is asking the question or investigating.
Does this mean Dave is irrelevant or too fightening for reporters (or even bloggers) to question?
I think he’s irrelevant… you can get huge increases in traffic by questioning him and there are a lot of bloggers that would want that.
1 week and no new AP photos. Dave will likely serve up the batch he has until AP asks him to stop. Maybe they are OK with old photos being served.
The RSS feed contains this text:
“Medium-resolution photos kindly provided by the Associated Press, and engineered by Scripting News, to help us develop a new way to stay current in an entertaining way.”
“(c) copyright 2007 Associated Press and Scripting News”
So, much for staying current. Dave’s moving forward to download videos I think. Seesmic (Loic Le Meur’s start-up) is adding enclosures to their RSS user feeds.
Any file type is fair game for an aggregator of content.