Double Flee A

flickr drama

So I saw these pictures on flickr, and was like, I like those. So I do what I do with every picture on the internet I like and want to corral, so I can look at them whenever I want. I put them on my desktop, waited till I had five or six, and uploaded them to flickr.

And then people freaked out.

You see, there is a contingent of people who don't put their pictures on flickr so that anyone can see them, but rather so that they can feel like real photographers and enforce the copyright that flickr promises them exists. I guess you should get something for your money when you're a paying member. So a whole gaggle of whiny pissants decided to attack in true internet tool form, this time in numbers I haven't seen since Todd Horton's youth group sought revenge for my heresy.

The real spectacle has passed into history. Sadly, since I was most likely in violation of flickr's terms of service, I decided to delete the three pictures that were sending so many people into violent hysterics. I still have, though, the lovely comments and the usernames of the peope who left them.

Rippie: love is the way said amid a stream of what must have been some seriously overdue, therapeutic foaming:
please allow me the first kick of your ass on your way to hell.

Love really is the way, is it not?

Trinahopeful was less rabid, but passive aggression can give you an ulcer:
Can we assume you are posting stolen pics of women because you are unlikely ever to find one to pose for you?

This kind of thing went on and on.

My favorite guy also had some choice words, but a picture really is worth a thousand of them. Here's his teeny little profile pic, which can also be used to kill cockroaches. I won't be crossing into this cathedral of nastiness:



So yeah. My argument is that all these pictures already sit right there on Flickr, and if they hadn't been credited by me to the people who they "belong to", which they hadn't, then in the comments beneath them, if they were claimed to have originated elsewhere and then that had been verified by myself, that justice had been served. Done! Who cares?

Wrong. Twenty comments later, I put it together that there are people on Flickr whose hobby is tracking down their own pictures on other people's flickr pages, raising hell, and calling the flickr cops. And I guess if the terms of service say that's how it works, thay have every right to do that. But they're still bitches.

In the bigger picture, I am a photo collector and a halfway decent tagger. If people are seeing a picture on my flickr page that I got from you, chances are it's because I tagged the picture better than you did. If you're going to get mad because people comment on your picture on my page, tag your pictures better. It's a big part of the whole thing. That, and if you want to have copyrighted pictures, the internet is a terrible place to publish them.

posted by dale @ 10:41 PM