Photo of woman wearing blouse from Flickr Commons.
As the heinous pun above suggests, this May week we are going to be looking at Flickr Commons. We've come across Flickr before: searchable photo albums, tagging photos, phenomenally successful Web 2.0 business, yadda yadda yadda. But wait! it gets better: Flickr Commons. It sounds a bit like it might be something to do with governments: it is, after a fashion. Essentially what it is is that Flickr has joined up with several civic institutions to let the people of earth (and possibly other places too, but let's not go into that) see the photos that were previously kept hidden in archives and civic files and comment on them, tag, post, add, emulsify, whatever. The first, and hitherto one of the most important, institutions to take up this offer was the American Library of Congress. There are a number of weird and wonderful things about this. First, this means that government institutions are signing up to the revolution of information. Gone are the scared faces of ancient librarians peeping from behind their office chairs at the big bad computer screens: now the big institutions are sharing what they can offer and contributing to the knowledge of the online community.
The bigger issue is how they are able to do this. Copyright is what governs who can put photos and other material where, when they can do it, and what gives them the authority to do it. The laws governing copyright are convoluted, outdated and in Britain's case absolutely ridiculous. If every person who had kept a video cassette of a TV program for more than thirty days was chased up, it would be bedlam. We think the judicial system here is bad now, but if we stuck resolutely to the letter of the law, we would a) lack a great deal of common sense and b) be getting the wrong end of the stick. Copyright is there to protect creative forces - artists, musicians, writers etcetera. Many of the old photos in the Library of Congress lack identification, date lines or something telling us who took the photo. So the Library of Congress has decided to post many photos with the disclaimer "no known copyright restrictions". The brilliance of this is that they aren't breaking the law by categorically stating the rights of viewers to use and reference the photo, but they provide us with this seemingly innocuous statement. But there's more. We are invited by Flickr Commons to look at the copyright laws governing use of material in general before we use the photos. Not only this, but it's a two-way thing: we are also encouraged to give back by tagging the images or perhaps putting comments up that can shed some light on the historical context of the photos. This is, in my opinion, a masterstroke. The public get to use the photos, but they are doing what we should have been encouraging them to do from the start: they are considering the law of their own accord, and they are even helping to contribute to help us develop a better cultural picture. Now the Smithsonian Institution and the Imperial War Museum have also signed up. So now you see how the cultural research facilities of the world are at last sticking their necks out and saying, "Look, here are some rather special photos. Use them, but don't mess us about. Read up about what you have to do, use them, perhaps credit us, but be sensible." It remains to be seen whether in this frenzy of joy we will spill the figurative red wine of foolishness over this precious opportunity. See below for the videos.
Welcome!
The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.
You're invited to help describe the photographs you discover in The Commons on Flickr, either by adding tags or leaving comments.
Flickr Commons statement (for link see above)
