Warning - Flickr Creative Commons image can turn All rights reserved at any time. I have been using flickr images, that are under the creative commons license for my blogs, for some time now. Most bloggers and webmasters uses the CC License images of flickr for their blog posts. I used to search for hours to find a good, no great image, for my next blog post until i stumbled upon this post of flickr. Now, this is NOT cool. Flickr allows the images released under "creative commons" to be changed to - "All rights reserved" at a later time. So, does this mean i have to go through the millions of images that i have used under the creative commons license of flickr and see if any of those has changed license? This answer below, might say a big NO to that, but unfortunately that is not the case. This sounds obvious, right? but how will you prove? If an image that you used under the "creative commons" license changes to "all rights reserved" and the owner sends you a DMCA, takes down your domain and hosting... kills your reputation totally... charges you money for using the image - how will you prove him otherwise? How can you prove that the image was earlier released under the "creative commons" license? Ask this question to flickr: This is something that people on flickr has already started to manipulate... they let their images to be used under the creative commons license, and then later change the license to all rights reserved and charge the image users with some good $$$. This is easy money, but it is a scam too... and from all i see, flickr does not provides any history of the image's copyright. Also, any platform where you can switch copyright license so easily without any trace or record, makes the legal waters muddy... Am not a legal expert, so here am expecting an answer from someone good in Internet/Copyright issues... an expert opinion on this will be great Now anyone can use any image from Flickr and say that it was issued under the "Creative Commons" license in the past and get away with it, because you can not prove it otherwise. So this is bad for both the flickr users and the people who uses their work.
Wow... What a drag! I would recommend that you contacted creative commons as well as flickr in order to notify them about the problem. I think this is a serious problem that probably isn't solved on this forum, if you know what I mean... If you do, I would appreciate it if you reported back to this thread about the outcome of this issue... http://creativecommons.org/contact http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/ Cheers, Brown Crow