Everyblock.com continued to use my image on another page even after they removed the first one. It took several more emails before it was removed. I have little doubt my images will show up in the future. I totally disagree with the sites policy and usage, it needs to be looked into.

Dude, they just wrote that they were using it under “fair use”. What part of “fair use” do you not understand?

They have a system that rips images from Flickr regardless of copyright and licensing and then try to claim “Fair Use”.

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After I found a photograph of mine used without permission I sent the following email:

The following photograph of mine was used without permission and is in breach of my copyright and Flickr community guidelines. “Just because an image is set to “public view” doesn’t mean it’s free to use on 3rd party sites (even when using a link back). You are a for-profit site and should know better. The copyright is clearly displayed in two different places on the page (one being directly below) and also on the image itself. The following image must be removed within 24hrs or result in legal action..

my image:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dtribby/3850455519/

infringed usage:
http://chicago.everyblock.com/locations/zipcodes/60617/

EveryBlock’s policy of using Flickr “public photos” is heavily flawed. Only public photos whose authors give permission or are listed under certain “creative commons license” can be used on 3rd party sites.

If this is not quickly taken care of I will also be filing with yahoo’s copyright office as your usage breaks Yahoo’s “Copyright and Intellectual Property Policy”.

-David Tribby Photography

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Their response:

Hi there,

Sorry for causing you concern! On EveryBlock, we link to Flickr photos on a neighborhood level, so visitors to our site can view photos (and
a whole bunch of other stuff) near them. We use the small Flickr thumbnails under the doctrine of fair use — and do not publish the full-sized photos, or even medium-sized thumbnails.

Still, we respect your wishes. We’ve removed the photo you mentioned, and we’ve made a note in our system not to link to any of your photos from our site ever again.

By the way, your photos were made available to us because your Flickr account allows third-party sites to access them. You might consider following the steps on this page — http://chicago.everyblock.com/photos/about/ — to ensure that no other third-party sites use your photos. As I said, EveryBlock won’t display your photos anymore, but you might want to take the extra precaution outlined in that link to ban other sites from using your photos, too. Hope this helps.

Have a good one,

Adrian

–
Adrian Holovaty
EveryBlock.com

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The defense that they “link to Flickr photos on a neighborhood level” and “We use the small Flickr thumbnails under the doctrine of fair use — and do not publish the full-sized photos, or even medium-sized thumbnails.” doesn’t change the fact that they are illegally grabbing images. A flawed system is no excuse! and it doesn’t matter what size you used. Copyright isn’t based off size!
I don’t have to block third-party access to the API. They have to use the API responsibly!

They removed my image but have not changed their policy and continue to use copyrighted (all rights reserved) images.