Flickr my Myxer! Or. Don’t.

So we launched what I thought was going to be a wonderfully well-received feature on Myxer this past weekend. Using the public flickr APIs, we wired up Myxer’s search functionality such that, in addition to searching our large catalog of user-submitted images, we would also search public photos hosted by flickr. We then added a “send to phone” feature to the images, so that Myxer users could send images they discovered to their phones (e.g., to use as wallpapers).

We loved this feature internally, because most of us around here use flickr as a way to share simple snapshots of people and places that we want to share with others. Adding “send to phone” functionality to flickr was a great way to quickly find photos of friends, etc., and send them to your phone. Because we always included full attribution and direct links back to the hosting page on flickr, we thought the integration would be appreciated by the flickr community at large.

Unfortunately, that’s not exactly what happened.

Soon after we launched this feature on the evening of July 3, 2008, a thread appeared on Flickr’s help forums with the title Myxer Using Copyrighted Images Without Permission. After browsing through a dozen or so posts, it became fairly obvious that the community at large had some, err, issues with our implementation. We quickly disabled the Flickr integration feature on Saturday so that we could step back and take a look at the situation, and I posted a response on the flickr forum apologizing to the community for having obviously struck a nerve.

Comments publicly ranged from the straightforward (“The fact that you can see something on Flickr doesn’t automatically mean you can use it.”) to rather more USENET-style flaming to my personal email (“I guess you cheated in school and feel you can do anything you want just because you think you can”). At least there were a few less angry comments, for example a simple post by Jayal Aheram who said the words we were hoping everyone would say:

“Oh, sweet! They can send my photos and my favorites straight into my phone. How cool is that?”

So what was the problem? Well, the mechanical thing that caused grief was that our engineers mistakenly assumed that search results we received from the “public” flickr photostream via the API were all appropriate for use by Myxer (assuming we included all of the attribution information) because we had obtained a commercial API key. But as was very quickly pointed out to us after launch, the Flickr API Terms of Use state (in section 1.a.ii.):

…your use of the Flickr APIs [does not] override the photo owners’ requirements and restrictions, which may include “all rights reserved” notices…Creative Commons licenses or other terms and conditions that may be agreed upon between you and the owners. … If you use Flickr photos for a commercial purpose, the photos must be marked with a Creative Commons license that allows for such use, unless otherwise agreed upon between you and the owner…

In other words, without the explicit consent of the photo owner, a commercial Flickr API partner should filter out content that does not have an appropriate Creative Commons license attached to it. iansand pointed this out very concisely in a follow up post on the flickr forum (“Use CC Commercial content only and there will be no problems”).

So that appears to be a relatively simple fix for us: update our code to examine every item that comes back from the flickr API, and check it for a CC Commercial license, signaling that the owner of the photo has consented to commercial use such as ours. No CC license? Toss it in the bit bucket.

I think, though, that the mechanical failure is in many ways less notable than the failure to realize that, at a high level, not everyone who uses Flickr uses it like most of us here at Myxer do. Indeed, the Flickr community is home to a large number of professional photographers who use Flickr as a showcase for their commercial photography. This is to be contrasted with many people’s personal use of Flickr, as a convenient place to upload digital snaps they want to share freely with the world of family, friends, and so on. And while we have a couple of professional photographers in our company, it didn’t really sink in to us that there were many in the Flickr community who were not interested in spreading their photos far and wide, and opening them up to new uses by the web community.

Mea Culpa.

Let me repost some of my original reply from the Flickr forum thread:

“First of all, I want to apologize to everyone who was angered by the recent launch of our Flickr integration feature, and I want to thank everyone who took the time to send a note to our copyright alias (copyright@myxer.com). We do, in fact, read and act on every single email we receive.

Because of your emails, we have suspended Myxer’s Flickr integration features until we can re-evaluate the situation. (This feature was live on Myxer from late Thursday, 3 July, to Saturday, 5 July).

It was never our intention to power mobile delivery of any Flickr content against the wishes of the person who posted it to Flickr, and I feel terrible that there were many who felt violated by this feature. We were honestly just really excited to add what we thought was a really cool feature for Flickr users — the ability to send publicly-posted photos to mobile phones.”

Now, a couple of other bloggers picked up on this thread and ran with it. Jim Goldstein wrote a piece called How Every Flickr Photo Ended Up For Sale This Weekend on his blog that discusses the issue in the broader context of what responsibility Flickr should be burdened with with respect to controlling access to images via APIs, RSS feeds, and so forth. Says Jim:

This latest incident is by far the most egregious, as the use of photographs from Flickr were being sold with out the consent of a single photographer, all while photo licensing terms were programmatically ignored. I’m glad to see that Myxer took the proper steps to disable their Flickr integration, but this is the latest example of Flickr playing with fire. On some varying level it is easy to point the finger at Myxer, Dave Winer (author of FlickrFan), Eightface (the company behind FlickrRSS) or any other developer/company for improperly using the Flickr API, but I would argue that responsibility ultimately lies with Flickr.

(Now, I feel it is important to point out the fact that Myxer never sold photographs from Flickr. We are, indeed, a commercial company, but we are a service provider who generates revenue primarily by selling advertising around our conduit between the traditional web and mobile phones. Something akin to NetZero for mobile.)

Jim also points to Dave Winer’s FlickrFan (the website for which has the retro/Mosaic feel befitting a true web pioneer) as an example of concern for professional photographers.

These are indeed trying times for a massive number of creative people whose footing has been destabilized in this era of instant, zero-cost distribution of digital content on the internet. It’s not unlike the challenges faced by the music industry in the internet age, a topic about which I have previously written and that I spend a considerable amount of time thinking about.

I have to say, though, that I have always been a huge fan of Flickr, and have long respected the community of creative people that make it what it is. It pains me to see members of its community turn against pioneering features such as the open APIs, because I have seen firsthand how they have fostered innovation across a large spectrum of web companies. Web 2.0 itself owes a lot to the ‘mash-up’ spirit encouraged by Flickr early on, and the evolution of the web from an archipelago of isolated websites to a fluid and interconnected network of cooperating web services will ultimately bring previously unequaled opportunities to everyone — content creator and consumers alike.

And so I again apologize to all of those in the Flickr community who felt violated by our integration, and I assure you we will very carefully evaluate all of the details of our integration with third party sites going forward. Our current plan is to fix our original implementation such that it filters out non-CC Commercial content, as was discussed above. We’re also considering providing a mechanism by which Myxer users can proactively link their Myxer account to their Flickr account (on an opt-in basis) to make their Flickr photostream available on Myxer’s site according to their explicitly-defined policies.

I hope, on the second time around, the combination of Myxer & Flickr will be seen purely in a positive light by everyone!

Myk