Yahoo and Flickr - Against Freedom of Speech
Imagine an engineering and programming team creating the best photo sharing website on the internet. They must be pretty damn good at what they do. Now imagine that same team trying to do things that lawyers spent tons of money and time for college, then passing the BAR exam, doing it themselves with no prior training. Does it sound like a possible train wreck?
Well it is, and it involves key employees at Yahoo/Flickr.Yahoo/Flickr have now joined the ranks of Apple, where they delete forums, groups and discussions that are negative to their company.
For the last 6 months I’ve been reading and following stories on Flickr on the topic of banned users and deleted user accounts [I wished I saved all the links]. Some were shocking, where a user lost his acct for months that he had paid for and did nothing wrong. With the community behind this particular user, they were able to finally convince Flickr to restore that user’s account, after telling the community that the acct has been completely deleted. I was shocked by the strength of the rally cry that was created from the Flickr community to fight for what was right.
Firas Alkhateeb - Creater of the Obama/Joker Portrait
In August 2009, in a TechCrunch article “Flickr v. Free Speech. Where Is Their Courage?“, the technology world was questioning Yahoo/Flickr on their censorship. You must read the article, it was well written by Michael Arrington. The story hit the US when a user uploaded a picture of Obama looking like the Joker in Batman. Because President Obama has a Flickr account with White House photos, Yahoo/Flickr decided to quickly take down the photo to support the President. In doing so, they did it with the explanation of “Copyright Infringement”. Well that reasoning was false due to the “Fair Use and Parody” defenses [scroll down to read the Copyright Issues Section]. Legally that photo should have never been taken down. To this day, blood is boiling in many Americans on this specific topic.
Another great article on the subject by the NYTimes, “Obama Joker artist unmasked: A fellow Chicagoan“.
Now Flickr is deleting actual groups that have thousands of Flickr/Yahoo users part of that group, for negatively discussing the faults of Flickr/Yahoo. Users of the “DMU - Delete Me Uncensored” group have moved their discussions off of Flickr because of their ban.
Right now Flickr/Yahoo have major egg on their face for the poor choices they’ve made that affect their users. I’m curious to see what Flickr/Yahoo will do to change and adapt to the laws of the internet and Free Speech. My guess is that it will get worse, but at least it will make news more entertaining. All I can say is POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
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