Getty Images' Flickr collection is now live.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Getty Images, one of the stock photography powerhouses, has switched on a program by which selected Flickr photographers can license their images to paying customers.
In earlier days of the microstock business, in which photographers license images over the Internet for relatively low prices through sites including Getty's iStockphoto, there was speculation Flickr might jump into the market. After all, there's plenty of good material, and it's often already tagged for easier categorization.
Instead, though, Flickr and Getty announced a partnership in which Getty taps Flickr photographers it believes have potential to sell their photos through Getty. Invitations started going out in January, and now the Getty's Flickr collection is live, Yahoo announced on its blog Tuesday.
One complication, though: many photographers at Flickr offer their images under Creative Commons licenses that permit copying and redistribution of the photos.
According to the Flickr help section on the Getty program, Yahoo switches Creative Commons-licensed photos to all rights reserved if they're submitted to Getty:
Can I sell my Creative Commons-licensed content?
There is a chance one of your Creative Commons-licensed photos may catch the eye of a perceptive Getty Images editor. You are welcome to upload these photos into the Flickr collection on Getty Images, but you are contractually obliged to reserve all rights to sale for your work sold via Getty Images. If you proceed with your submission, switching your license to All Rights Reserved (on Flickr) will happen automatically.
If you're not cool with that, that's totally cool. It just means that particular photo will need to stay out of the Flickr collection on Getty Images.
Ben Metcalfe launched a discussion of the Creative Commons issue, pointing out that Creative Commons licenses are perpetual.
In response, a Getty Images representative said, "We would never expect anyone to revoke a license. We know that your image is being used with your permission by those who licensed it through CC (Creative Commons), which is why we are placing CC images we choose in RF (royalty-free licensing) only. We couldn't place it in RM (rights-managed) because rights management would not be possible. We came to this so as not to exclude inviting CC images."
The Smithsonian Institution has begun adding historical photos to The Commons, Flickr's project to host publicly held images.
Felix Nadar is one subject among hundreds from the Smithsonian Institution now visible at Flickr.
(Credit: Smithsonian)The Smithsonian added 800 photographs from its collection of 13 million images, and 1,200 more will be added in coming months, Yahoo said in a Thursday announcement.
"Our goals in participating in The Commons on Flickr are to expose new, larger, broader and younger audiences to our photographic collections and help them discover more of the Smithsonian educational resources," said Richard Kurin, the acting undersecretary for history, art, and culture, in a statement..
Flickr launched The Commons with the Library of Congress in January. It's also drawn interest from the Powerhouse Museum, which joined The Commons in April and said it's happy with the results it's seen.
Putting the photos on Flickr lets ordinary people add tags and other annotations. That can be good and bad: people can label historic buildings, but also clutter shots with inane notes such as the "daddy?" note on a photo of Albert Einstein and others.
Flickr is a prominent part of Yahoo, but changes are afoot at the site. Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, the husband-and-wife co-founders of Flickr, are leaving Yahoo.
- Nikon still leads Canon for SLR market in Japan - It's not the whole world, but Japan is a very important market. Pentax is a distant third.
- Novel GPS widget geotags photos on your flash card - This is a great idea: you insert your camera's flash card into this GPS device and it handles the geotagging from there. A much simpler work flow. But does it work with raw formats?
- Wacky Microsoft Popfly live-action demo - Putting something of a human face on an obscure coding exercise.
- Dan Heller's Photography Business Blog: Gaming the Creative Commons for Profit - Upshot of a three-part series: "The Creative Commons just doesn't fit in the photo world...no teeth for well-intentioned photographers...sharp and dangerous teeth for those who want to abuse the system and entrap anyone into paying big settlements."
- Ubuntu Hardy Heron Alpha 3 | Ubuntu - Details of Alpha 3 of Ubuntu's Hardy Heron release, due to ship in final form in April 2008.
- Flickr: The Photophlow emotes pool - For setting graphical emotes during Photophlow chats
- Flickr Set Manager - A tool to automatically create sets based on parameters such as tags.
- Economist uses CC-licensed photos on its Web site - This blog quotes a photog unhappy to find the Economist used his Creative Commons-licensed photo on its Web site. Sure sounds like commercial use to me, which the photog had precluded.
- 30-minute Olympus E-3 Promotional Video - A loooong Olympus promotional video with detailed descriptions of the E-3's abilities. Some nice illustrations of why a swiveling LCD is useful. Painful background music.
- Penguinistas hack Android onto real hardware | LinuxDevices.com - Programmers get Android working on Sharp Zaurus and various other devices.
Correction 10:05 a.m. PST: This blog initially misstated when Red Hat made the announcement. It was Thursday.
Red Hat is working on gaining the Common Criteria certification for its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for running Java software, the company announced Thursday.
Such certification is a significant step in gaining acceptance among governmental and international customers. The Linux seller is seeking Evaluation Assurance Level 2 across multiple operating systems, not just Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a company representative said.
RHEL 5, the company's main product, currently has EAL 4+ certification, a higher level, on both Hewlett-Packard and IBM servers, and SGI has EAL 3+ and is seeking 4+ certification.
Red Hat has been getting more active in the Java arena. It acquired the JBoss software in 2006 for running Java Enterprise Edition software on servers, though the company has had trouble meeting its JBoss financial targets. And Red Hat announced a partnership with Java creator Sun Microsystems on Monday under which it will contribute to the core Java Standard Edition software project.
Unfettered sharing is one of the hallmarks and touted virtues of open-source programming, but even companies closely allied to the movement can grow uncomfortable with such liberal principles.
Case in point: Palamida and Black Duck Software, two rivals that offer software and services to help companies ensure open-source and proprietary software aren't inappropriately intermixing.
On Monday, Black Duck announced its Open Source License Resource Center, described as "an online guide of particular interest to companies developing or deploying software that includes code governed by version three of the GNU General Public License (GPL) or Lesser General Public License (LGPL)."
A day later, Palamida cried foul. "After two days of intense investigation, we have confirmed that most of our database has been copied directly--word for word and misspelling for misspelling, with very few original additions to our initial work," said Palamida spokeswoman Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale, pointing the "blatant plagiarism" finger at Black Duck.
Black Duck on Wednesday acknowledged using some of Palamida's information, but sees things differently.
"We have a spider team that goes out to other sources of information on the Internet (e.g., news, blogs) to collect data. Palamida is only one of many sites that they visit and ultimately the source of only a small slice of data," said Andreas Zink, vice president of engineering, in a statement. Other sources include SourceForge, RubyForge, the Free Software Foundation's Savannah, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network and FreshMeat, he said.
Palamida has been keeping a running tally of free and open-source programming projects that have shifted from GPLv2 to the new GPLv3, a significant update released earlier this year. The current tally is 940 GPLv3 projects. The database is compiled by Palamida with extensive contributions from outsiders.
"It has always been the aim of Palamida to run our Resource Site like an open-source project--encouraging collaboration, edits, transparency and commentary--so we understand that our data has always been free for redistribution. However, we did not anticipate the entirety of our database being re-copied and re-packaged as original information without appropriately referencing Palamida as the source," LaBancz-Bleasdale said.
Black Duck disagreed with some of Palamida's data, though. "Our spiders continuously review and validate our data. Based on this research, we decided not to publish at least 40 projects from Palamida's site since we did not agree with their assessment. Some examples include Wine is Not an Emulator, GNU Common Lisp, GNU gv and Zhu3D," Zink said.
Because of Black Duck's move, Palamida is changing the terms of use of the database so it's governed by a Creative Commons license, the company said.
It didn't specify which license, but many Creative Commons licenses permit others to use and modify content as long as they give credit to the original author.
"We are disappointed to have to add any sort of copyright but have chosen an open-source license in hopes of continuing the spirit of the resource," LaBancz-Bleasdale said.
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