Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

It was interesting to read over at Rev Dan Catt’s blog today that Google has now begun including Flickr photos into their Google Maps product. I love Google Maps and use it *heavily,* especially when planning trips to new cities to photograph.

Basically, when you are in Google Street View mode for any part of Google Maps, you are presented with an option to click on “user photos.” Google then presents you with a list of thumbnail sized photos that you can go through one by one and view actual photos on the maps based on their own Picassa photo sharing and now Flickr. As you click on the various photos, it pulls up a high res version of each of the photos, showing you the image.

When I first learned of this feature I thought for sure that it would be limited to Creative Commons Flickr photos. I wasn’t sure how Google could legally take high res photos for CC non-commercial photos or all rights reserved photos and integrate full sized versions of them into their product. But it seems as though this is exactly what they’ve done.

If you look at the screen shot above, it features a photo by Flickr photographer Patrick Boury, if you look at that photo on Flickr, it is licensed as “all rights reserved.” I surfed Google’s Street View around San Francisco today checking out lots of the photos and many (in fact I’d say most) of the Flickr images that Google is presently using are either Creative Commons non-commercial licensed photos or all rights reserved licensed photos.

While I know that in the past Google has used thumbnail images in their Google Image Search product of all rights reserved Flickr photos, I haven’t actually seen them use full scale large versions of all rights reserved photos in other products like this.

Me personally, I have no problem with Google using any of my own geotagged photos this way, but I’m pretty open and willing to share my photos. Especially though with thousands of Flickr users now formally licensing their all rights reserved photos through Getty Images, it makes me wonder if Getty Images would consider this sort of use by Google as infringing on the exclusivity that Flickr users give them over images when licensing them for sale with them.

I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not exactly sure if Google is infringing here or not, but it raises an interesting question about fair use. Google is a for profit company and even displays adverts on the street view pages using Flickr photos.

It should also be noted that Flickr has a way to exclude your photos from being indexed by Google and other search engines in your Flickr preferences. I suppose if someone felt strongly enough about this issue then they might consider hiding their images from search engines and I’d assume that they’d then not be indexed in Google’s Street View product.

Glitch, a game of giant imagination, is the new slogan crafted by a group of former Flickr employees, including Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, to describe their new socially based massively-multiplayer game. CNET has a meaty indepth behind the scenes article out on the new game which will be free to play, is browser based and is currently in private alpha testing to be released publicly in the second half of the year.

In addition to Butterfield, former Flickr employees Cal Henderson, Eric Costello and Serguei Mourachov are also co-founders of a new company called Tiny Speck that is releasing the game. Daniel Burka, former creative director at Digg, is also part of the new team.

For those of you who are familiar with the history of Flickr, you’ll be aware that prior to becoming a photo sharing site, Flickr was originally released as a socially based game called Game Neverending.

I’m really digging American Suburb X lately. It’s a wonderful photography magazine format website and has some interviews and articles definitely worth checking out. This week they posted a wonderful meaty essay on the work of one of my favorite photographers Garry Winogrand.

The site is chock full o’ interviews and substantial articles on the past, present and future of photography. Doug Rickard edits the site. His photography is pretty good as well and can be found here.

Check it out, if you haven’t already.

An interesting thread over at the strobist group on Flickr. Photographer Tim Kamppinen recently was emailed regarding some of his sports photographs that were appearing for sale and as promotional photos on the website for a San Francisco Bay Area based professional wedding phtoographer, Dennis DeSilva.

DeSilva, who operates under the name Studio Seven Photography, was recently featured on KTVU where he talked about his relationship photographing former Senator Ted Kennedy.

When contacted by Kamppinen regarding the apparent image theft, DeSilva apologized in a brief email according to Kamppinen:

“Tim,
Sorry I got it mixed up with my other photographers.

Thanks
Dennis”

The images of Kamppinen’s were also removed from DeSilva’s site.

Was this a simple case of a pro photographer mistakenly posting photos from Flickr as his own? Or was DeSilva purposely using Flickr to fill in holes in his own portfolio where he did not have photos? Whatever the case, it seems like folks over at the Strobist thread are pretty worked up about it.

Thanks, Os!

Update #1: Dennis DeSilva responds.

Dennis”

Update #2, Another photographer on Flickr is now also alleging that DeSilva had stolen his work as well. Flickr user seanmophoto who teaches a high school photography class is alleging that the photos of the swimmers and soccer players appearing on DeSilva’s website are in fact his.

Also in the comments below commenter David points out that another of the photos of the single swimmer which appeared on DeSilva’s site is actually credited to Chris Schmid who appears to be out of Switzerland at Photo Shelter and iStockphoto.

I was troubled today to see Starbucks take the draconian step of locking down 100% of their group threads in the Official Starbuck’s group on Flickr. All threads were locked today and a note was added to their Flickr Group reading:

“This group has helped inform us of the inconsistent experiences photographers have in our stores. We have put group discussion on hold until we have more updates on an official policy for photography in our stores. We appreciate your patience and encourage you to check back in the following months for an update.”

Censorship is never good and for a corporation to open a dialogue with their customers and then shut it down due to criticism is pretty much directly in contrast to the transparency that social media ought to be about.

In December I blogged about the difficulty that Starbuck’s was having articulating a reasonable photo policy in their Flickr group where they have been being attacked by photographers over the course of the past months. Many photographers on Flickr felt it was somewhat hypocritical of Starbucks to encourage photographers to post photos representing their “Starbuck’s experience” when so many photographers were regularly being told that they are not allowed to photograph in Starbuck’s stores.

The question about whether or not photography is or is not allowed in Starbucks stores still seems very much in the air, and from the request that photographers now check back with the group in the “months” ahead (after having this issue linger since September of last year) it doesn’t sound like they will be resolving this question anytime soon. Taking over six months to respond to photographers on this issue is a huge Starbucks FAIL. And now locking their threads to avoid continued criticism for what will likely be many more months, well, it’s obvious that Starbucks does not get social media and an even bigger FAIL.

Starbucks should apologize to the photographers who have invested many hours in this group of theirs and reopen threads. They should make it a priority to establish a reasonable photo policy and have it communicated to their stores ASAP. Of course their timing for shutting down their group threads, late on a Friday afternoon where it hopefully will get lost over the weekend on the web is also pretty obvious and weak.

There is an unlocked thread on another non-official Starbucks group about this issue here.

The great thing about the web is that it makes publishing so simple and cheap that virtually anyone can do it. This allows even the most obscurest of content to find a home. It allows people to turn their own private little passions (whatever they are) into quality online magazines really.

Yesterday this guy published one of my photos of a painting that I took at the Art Institute of Chicago. I love how Flickr can become a resource for all of the obscurity that runs free on the web.

Who would have thought that there would be an entire site devoted to the works of the French painter William Adolphe Bouguereau?

Just imagine the possibilities of all of the content that will flourish in the next 20 years online. It’s this free passion-driven long-tail content that will continue to chip away at TV, movies, popular music, museums, print media and books as more and more of it comes available and as better and better tools are created to help us find whatever our itch is that needs to be scratched. What an exciting time to be an artist or publisher with an unprecedented historical opportunity to disseminate your work.