I just deleted my account with Flickr because they censored my protest-art (shown here). They claimed I was harassing and abusing other members by having it posted.My protest-art has the words "Summertownsun sucks". I put this artwork up in protest of Summertownsun (sellers of Luna Girl vintage photos) complaining that I was infringing on their copyrighted work. They said I was posting images that they own. So flickr removed the images. But the images are actually in the public domain. So I protested Summertownsun's actions by creating a piece of artwork and posting it on Flickr.
Then Flickr (or as I now like to call them, Fluckr), in all its controlling, tightwad glory, removed that image too, and sent me an email which said, "
Hi dazzlecat, In joining Flickr, you agreed to abide by the Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. Specifically, you must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Flickr members. We've removed the content, "SummertownSun Publishing Sucks!", from your photostream. Please note that similar activity may result in the termination of your account without warning. Regards, Omar "
So what really happened here? Was I harassing other members? NO! The simple fact is that Flickr censored my artwork!!! All because someone (I am assuming summertownsun) complained.
I sent out an email to all my contacts on Flickr letting them know I was deleting my account and why. Now I'm going to have to make another piece of protest-art called Flickr Sucks!
PS. I've released this image into the public domain. Feel free to post it anywhere, do anything you want with it, etc.
6 comments:
Posted this here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/dmu2/discuss/72157613567727111/
and here:
http://friendfeed.com/e/ae279180-139a-4130-8e79-c694cb815c12/FLICKER-SUCKS/
So who is most hurt by you leaving Flickr? Hm. I don't get that kind of protest.
Dazzlecat, I'm going to try to raise more awareness about this. As far as I'm concerned there is no reason that Flickr should be censoring you for either publishing public domain art or for saying something sucks.
I hope it's ok that I borrowed your photo and posted it to my blog and Flickrstream to raise awareness regarding this. I hope you receive an apology from Flickr over this.
http://thomashawk.com/2009/02/so-who-sucks-worse-summertown-sun-publishing-or-flickr.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/3268753091/
Anonymous,
In reply to your comment: I didn't delete my Flickr account in protest, I deleted it because I don't want to be a part of a photo site that censors artwork. Deleting my account doesn't hurt anyone, not flickr and certainly not me. You misunderstood what my protest is - its the artwork.
Bravo!!! I support this 100% and I look forward to adding this to my up and coming blog post about flickr's mistreatment of artists, customers and users.
Flickr was a lot of inconveniences, I eliminate my account since they start to announce viagra online products by everywhere. Apart it has too many negative points.
Post a Comment