Yahoo!ed by Flickr

Tonight, we removed all of our images from Flickr. Why? Because of Flickr’s complete and utter lack of diligence with regards to their API programming, and it’s inability to work as advertised with regard to correctly filtering copyright protected images. It seems that images, even those flagged by the account holder as "copyright, all rights reserved," are freely available via RSS feeds. This allows people to write programs to scrape images from Flickr for use for, well, whatever.

The latest violation involved every image on Flickr being available for sale to anyone by third party vendors, regardless of copyright status, with no compensation or even credit to the original photographer.

So, why do I say "Yahoo!ed?" Because Flickr is no owned and operated by Yahoo!, long known for selling user information and other major violations of their own terms of service. They have managed to, in my opinion, ruin every well-run web business they’ve purchased (witness OneList’s transformation into Yahoo!Groups, where users security and e-mail preferences are randomly reset, allowing e-mail addresses to be had by third party spammers).

This action on our part will break some of the image and embedded video links on this site as well, since the source files were stored on Flickr. It is unlikely that we will bother to replace the missing images or videos at this time.

For those interested in seeing or purchasing our images, you can visit our Orchard Studios web site. It will take us some time to recreate and upload all of the images we had on Flickr. However, this will give us time to refine our available images.