Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

Look what just showed up in my email box.

Dear New York Times Reader,

Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
Publisher, The New York Times
Chairman, The New York Times Company

Last night before drifting off to bed, the lovely mrsth and I decided to watch another episode of her latest TV series on Netflix Watch Now, “Damages.” She’s been watching it more than me but it’s a nice way to wind down the end of a day together.

The only problem was that when we went to watch it on Watch Now on our Wii we got a message from Netflix telling us that they couldn’t play the show because we already were streaming 2 other movies on our Netflix account. The only thing was, we weren’t watching *any* other movies. The Netflix error message told me that I could get more help at Netflix.com/help.

Annoyed at the message, I got up and went downstairs to the kitchen to log on to our Netflix account on the Mac Mini to try and see what was going on.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything on the Netflix help site that addressed this question. When searching for the error message on Netflix nothing came up either. I did find in my account settings section where it showed that I had six authorized devices on my account — our wii, my wife’s iPhone, our two AppleTVs, my wife’s MacBook Pro laptop and our family HP notebook computer. I got an error message saying that I had too many devices linked to my account so in order to try and fix this I deleted the iPhone as an authorized device.

Then I went back upstairs to try to see if that would let us watch Netflix. Nope.

I still couldn’t figure out what was going on. We were watching Battlestar Galactica with the kids earlier on the AppleTV in the living room but I thought it had been turned off. Just to make sure I went down to the living room and physically unplugged the AppleTV.

Then I tried playing the show on Netflix again, Nope. Still no luck.

Finally I just got on the phone and called Netflix. After waiting on hold for a while I finally got to speak with a very nice customer service rep. This person looked into my account and told me that the reason why I couldn’t watch a show was that they showed that I was streaming Battlestar Galactica on my AppleTV and some other kids show (that my son apparently was watching earlier) on my wife’s iPhone.

I explained to the rep that this was not that case. That we were not watching anything on either of these two devices. I told her that I in fact had removed the iPhone as an authorized device and had physically unplugged the AppleTV unit we’d been watching earlier. She told me that apparently this doesn’t matter. If you don’t quit out of the movie the correct way Netflix will still show it streaming. She blamed “licensing requirements” that prevented them from doing anything about it. The good news was, she told me, that after 2 hours Netflix will time out without any activity and that the streams would end.

I explained to the rep that I didn’t want to watch TV in two hours. That I wanted to watch TV right then. I told her that I would be asleep in two hours. Even though she told me that she saw that I’d deleted the iPhone on my account though she said that her hands were tied and that there was nothing she could do. She did say that if I agreed to upgrade my account and pay them more money though that she could turn the TV back on for me because by adding a more expensive plan I’d get to use more streams at once.

Personally I think this sucks. I’m actually ok with Netflix’s 2 movie at a time requirement. But if their technology can’t do a good enough job to show when movies are playing and when they are not playing then I don’t think it’s fair for them to impose this DRM restriction. At a bare minimum a customer service rep ought to be able to reset your account if you’ve gone through all the trouble of waiting on hold and calling in.

The customer service rep finally did recommend that I try logging in and out of my Netflix account on my laptop to see if this might fix things. When I did this sure enough we were finally able to watch the show. Of course 15 minutes into watching it my son came into our bedroom complaining. He said that he wanted to finish watching the movie he’d started on the iPhone earlier that evening on the AppleTV in their bedroom, but he couldn’t because it said there were already two movies being streamed. Unfortunately he didn’t get to watch his movie last night.

With all this talk of cord cutting, Netflix has to do a better job. As much as I love the service, TV in the home needs to be easier than this. Until they can get this down correct, I think that they ought to disable their 2 movie at time restriction. I understand that they don’t want you handing out your Netflix user ID and password to other people outside your home and so they need to nail this down, but paying for a service and then not being able to use it fairly sucks.

ShutterSalt is a new site that is doing some nice interview/profile work with photographers. I had the pleasure of doing an interview with them recently that you can read here.

You can follow them on Twitter here.

I just read what appears to be an official Yahoo response over the Flickr censorship of Hossam el-Hamalawy, aka Arabawy’s photos. I blogged about Arabawy’s plight over the weekend here and also wrote an open letter to Carol Bartz over the censorship here. TechCrunch also reported on the censorship here.

The response was written by Yahoo’s Director of Business & Human Rights Program, Ebele Okobi-Harris.

There are so many problems with Yahoo’s poor justification for this censorship in this post that I don’t even know where to begin.

I will quote some of their rationalizations for the censorship and try and refute some of their primary points.

Don’t upload anything that isn’t yours.

This rule applies regardless of content, or of the purpose of the post. The reasoning for this is not only about copyright—and in this case, it’s not a copyright issue. It’s an issue of community: Flickr is meant to be a place where photographers, amateur and professional, can share their own work. Flickr, as a community, does not want to be a photo-hosting site, and anyone signing up for Flickr agrees to those rules, which apply whether one is a proud grandmother or a human rights activist.

This still seems to be the main justification point by Yahoo for removing Arabawy’s photos. The photos he posted weren’t his Yahoo says.

As I pointed out before, Flickr is so chock full of people violating that rule that it’s laughable. Flickr’s *OWN STAFFERS* routinely violate this rule. Flickr’s Co-Founders who still maintain accounts on the site break this rule. Thousands of people on Flickr, literally, break this rule.

Ironically, the *VERY FLICKR ACCOUNT* linked on this Yahoo blog’s page as belonging to the Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Program’s is CLEARLY posting work that is identified as not belonging to the account owner. A clear violation of Flickr’s rules by the very same blogger justifying the rule in the first place.

Are there times when this rule should be applied? Sure. Like, you know, possibly when there is a REAL copyright dispute (which this blog post already has said was not the case here), but again, not the case for Arabawy.

Are there other times when it should be ignored? Sure. Would Flickr remove a photo of co-founder Stewart Butterfield that another photographer had taken of him (and probably gave him permission to post) that he posted to his flickrstream in clear violation of this rule? Of course they wouldn’t. Nor should they. That would be stupid.

I have heard from some activists who believe that Flickr applies the rule unevenly; they have pointed out other photographs, including others from Mr. El Hamalawy’s account, that also appear to be photographs that were not taken by Mr. El Hamalawy. Here’s the thing: with millions and millions of photographs and Flickr accounts, Flickr does not have the ability to proactively moderate for photographs that were not taken by Flickr users. Flickr reactively responds to reports from Flickr community members.

Untrue.

Yahoo seems to be saying that they basically ignore the rules of their site unless someone is reported for breaking the rules and then they take action. There are many accounts on flickr who have broken the rule of not posting your own work AND have been reported but that have not been censored.

The fact of the matter is that being reported on Flickr doesn’t automatically result in flickr enforcing the rules. It merely flags the account and allows flickr to make a decision as to whether or not they will act. Although I do not have access to all reported account issues on Flickr, I can guarantee you that there are other times when Flickr has chosen not to enforce the “not your work” rule. I have firsthand knowledge of some of these cases in fact.

What about the stated purpose of a community or semi-public space? Flickr was created specifically to allow photographers to share their work.

Yeah? then why is the blogger’s own linked flickr account on the very page justifying the censoreship showing work by OTHER PEOPLE as shown above and as a CLEAR VIOLATION OF FLICKR’S RULES? The hypocrisy doesn’t get much richer than this folks.

I am a passionate supporter of free expression as a fundamental human right, and I believe strongly in the idea that technology and social media provide incredible opportunities to create social change. I also know that millions of people use Yahoo! products, including Flickr, to create their version of the change they wish to see in the world. That’s a tremendous privilege, and a huge responsibility.

While it is admirable of Yahoo to try and put a human spin on this bad PR story and try to justify what they did here after the fact by using an employee who probably is in fact dedicated to human rights, the fact remains that what Yahoo and Flickr did does NOT support free expression as a fundamental human right. It does NOT support the idea that technology and more specifically Flickr should be used to create social change.

The decision to censor Arabawy’s photos of alleged TORTURERS was a bad one all the way around. It was bad from a human rights perspective. It was bad from a freedom of speech perspective. It was bad simply from a pure business perspective as I outlined in my letter to Carol on Sunday.

Rather than Yahoo trying to offer a completely lame cop out corporate rationalization for this act of censorship, they should own up to it, apologize for it, reinstate Arabawy’s photos and say that they will try to do better in the future.

Flickr Head of Product Matthew Rothenberg has announced on his Twitter account that he will be leaving Flickr. From Rothenberg: “Here goes: after 5 years, I will be stepping away from Flickr. Will miss working with such a talented, hard-working, and hard-drinking team.” Rothenberg added in a follow up tweet that he knows what he is doing next but not announcing it just yet.

Since the departure of Flickr Co-Founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, there have now been three different managers of the Flickr product at Yahoo. Kakul Srivastava who took over the job when Butterfield resigned, Douglas Alexander who took over for Srivastava and then Rothenberg.

On his LinkedIn page, Rothenberg described his role at Flickr as being “somewhat akin to piloting a rocket-powered banana-delivery truck* at 20,000mph through a dense forest filled with dangerous and hungry apes. (*p.s. that truck is also on fire.)”

Recently Rothenberg posted a screenshot showing that over the past six months Flickr has been growing under his management, however, Flickr has also come under fire in various press reports recently for failing to keep pace with photo sharing at Facebook. This past weekend Flickr also received criticism for censoring a popular Egyptian Blogger’s photos of Egyptian Secret Police.

I’ve not seen any word yet on who will be taking over the reins at Flickr with Rothenberg’s departure, although Yahoo did last month hire Hotmail Veteran Steve Douty to oversee the Flickr property, among other things, as the Vice President of Communications and Communities.

Update: TechCrunch has an official statement from Yahoo on Rothenberg’s departure:

Spiering’s profile is on Flickr here.

Update #2: Rothenberg has written a blog post about leaving flickr.

Update #3: Rothenberg blogs now that he is headed to bit.ly as the new head of product there. Ironically, bit.ly is one of the url shorteners that is blacklisted on Flickr’s site.