Is Flickr Hiding Screenshots?
Alan Levine at Cog Dog Blog has a bone to pick with Flickr. I’d have one too, if I were him. It seems, according to Alan, that a Flickr admin has deemed his screenshots of Second Life to be contravening the site’s Community Guidelines — which they clearly do not — and has shoved his Pro account into the not-for-public-consumption area. His follow-up emails have gotten no response. I’m baffled as to why SL screens should be deemed unworthy, especially when there are so many World of Warcraft screens on Flickr. Game companies are generally fine with making screenshots available for public use, and Second Life expressly grants users the IP rights in their creations, so what’s the problem? Alan appeals for help at his blog, so get in touch with him there if you have any suggestions. I’m blogging it here for that reason, but also because the 3pointD world deserves to have its images given similar respect to those coming out of the real world. The real world will always be more real, make no mistake, but I see no reason to disallow images from the virtual world on a site like Flickr. The social, commercial and other experiences that take place in virtual worlds are no less “real” than the interactions we have in the physical world. Visual recordings of such moments should be able to take their place beside photos from the physicial world on a site like Flickr.
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Flickr also created controversy by blocking illustrations and cartoons earlier this year. I believe the rationale was that Flickr only runs photos publicly, not drawings. So anything but photos (a screenshot is not a photo) is hidden from the public eye.
[…] 3pointd.com is having an article about Alan Levine who has some problems with flickr basically hiding his photos from Second Life from public searches. As I think this is important for all of us Second Life users I just copy that article here in the hope that you will also email flickr about this (see email address in the actual blog post by Alan) to tell them how you see that case. I just did it and I am thinking about more carefully whether I should go pro now with my Second Life flickr account. If there’s no definite statement from them probably not. So make sure you email them! Is Flickr Hiding Screenshots?: […]
Tony, I agree that a screenshot is not a photo. But does that mean that Flickr is a site devoted only to a particular image-recording technology? And what about all those WoW screens?
Remember that photo storage service that promised “Unlimited Photo Storage for Life” called Zing? It lasted, oh, about 2 years? I was an early user with Sims offline screenshots — I must have posted literally thousands in all my story albums, contests, news reports, comic strips etc. based on the Sims offline game.
The creators of the site put me on their user’s group soundboard list or something and they’d write me personal letters and ask me why I was putting thousands of very poor resolution photos on the site, that were not good enough to be used to generate the mugs, key chains, CDs etc that people were supposed to use this free site for — i.e. you store the photos for free, then you buy all the other stuff using your photos.
They asked me merely out of curiosity, but they never sought to stop what Iw as doing. I remember a guy looking through it and emailing me that the stories and contests etc. were cool. Somehow, they just decided that getting more use and more hits to their site and more word of mouth, even if it had to come from games and screenshot communities, was fine. That seemed an enlightened decision. Of course, like a lot of other free photo storage sites in the 1990s, it died and closed, the model didn’t work.
Tony > (a screenshot is not a photo)
Mark > Tony, I agree that a screenshot is not a photo.
Have to disagree. A screenshot is a photo, or photo enough. It’s a captured image of SL on the screen (the picture button in SL even says “snapshot”). What should he do? Take a picture of his screen with a real life boxy camera with lense and then put it on Flickr? :) Also, you must not pull still images from videos you’ve taken. Technically those aren’t photographs either, they’re “stills.”
But Flickr seems to get it and even has 3pointD massively multiplayer roots as Game Never Ending, so my guess is this fell through the cracks and’ll be fixed soon. I hope. Otherwise it would be a repeat of Friendster deleting “Fakester” profiles, which some say helped pave the way for the migration to MySpace.
Thanks for picking up my post and getting it some discussion/attention.
Anyone not familiar with second life might label these as screenshots, and anyone who takes the time to compose Snapshots inside SL would know it is quite different. I content that my SL snapshots are not screens dumps, and merely ask we stretch the notion of what is a camera.
Again, if I had not firstly just loaded my account with SL images, and tossed in a mix of photos of cats, trees, people with cell phones, etc, I would not have a problem.
My bigger issue is why flickr has not responded to my second message– that seems un flickr-like from my experience.
thanks again!
If someone uses their digital camera to take a snapshot of SL on a computer screen, is that a photo? ;)
I was having the same problems with my flickr site http://www.flickr.com/photos/54189702@N00/. There is a message on the flickr public tag search page _Are you wondering why your photos aren’t showing up here?_. I didn’t think that I was _posting offensive images, or junk downloaded from the web,_ so I waited a week to see if they’d showup; they didn’t. I concluded flickr sucks, and now use snapzilla [http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/] to publish and record SL.
A lot of the issues we’re raising here related to what constitutes a photo or not, and/or what Flickr’s policies are were covered during the cartoonists vs. Flickr debate (which took place last year, not earlier this year). I finally found a link to where the whole thing started.
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/11/23/drawings_banned_from.html
I do believe a screenshot is a form of photograph, and I also believe that the definition of “photograph” melts when faced with modern technology.
A Flickr Screenshot Controversy?…
Over at 3pointD is a piece about Flickr hiding screenshots based on complaints Alan had over at cogdogblog.
There’s a thing called “NIPSA”: Not in Public Site Areas. I’ll be honest, it’s the first time I’ve heard of this, and wouldn’t have t…
I posted this as a comment at Tao Takashi’s blog yesterday, concerning a similar entry, but thought it’d be worthwhile to post it here too…
I’ve been posting screenshots from SL to my Flickr account [flickr.com/photos/jasonpettus]for about a month now, and have had no problems from Flickr as far as either copyright issues or “real” photos versus “virtual” ones. Please be warned, however, that Flickr treats sexually graphic screenshots from the game the same way as human sexual shots; that is, you’re expected to tag them as “restricted” (so that only your contacts can see them), and not to post X-rated material at all.
Also, now that I’ve been posting screenshots myself, I’ve learned of another complication, this time completely sociological; that many SL players consider screenshots the same as real-life photographs, with all the restrictions that come with it. (No “photos” on private property, that is, obtain a person’s permission before posting a photo, etc.) Taking and posting screenshots of Second Life is a more complicated thing than maybe some people realize, because of the unique way that many players think of the game; I urge people to use caution and to ask permission of others whenever possible.
–Miller Copeland (SL) / Jason Pettus (RL)
[…] UPDATE: Eric Rice and 3pointD have assisted in getting out the word about Flickr’s controversial policy. […]
Flickr is doing this to control the semantics of their site. This is kind of a no-no for an emergent social community site: “Let the community do whatever it wants, just help it achieve it’s goals.” Flickr, on the other hand, is saying, “no, we want the community to serve this particular function.” This can be justified in their liberal parentage, only if it seems like the community wants to reject Second Lifers from the bunch. i.e. If the community wants to become a purely pseudo-amateur photo-sharing site. But I’m skeptical that’s the case. I doubt people e-mail into flickr demanding that other flickr users don’t flood the site with personal drawings or screenshots from games.
But even given that flickr wants to control what the site is about, I can’t think of what mission they have for which Second Life violates.
If I do a search on flickr for “X-Men” here’s what I would hope to find:
- someone in a wolverine costume
- a photo snapped at the X-Men premiere
- a photo of someone’s X-Men toys
What I shouldn’t be seeing are:
- someone’s x-men’s drawings
- a cover scanned from an x-men magazine
- screen shots from the x-men video game
Even if I WANT to see those, flickr is making a point by forcing me to go somewhere else for my fix. Suggestively, I should be going to Google Images if I want all images related to the keyword “X-Men.”
So where does a Second Life screenshot from the X-Men Premiere fit into all of this? I’d say it fits into the first category. Because if people are participating in a live event related to the X-Men movie, with many participants wearing costumes inspired by the X-Men genre, then I’d want to see that if I’m supposed to see any of those three.
I think flickr’s struggle is in trying to craft a policy that includes everything they want the site to be about, and excludes everything they don’t. Really, they shouldn’t be vexing so hard, and just add Second Life as an exception. Or maybe include virtual worlds that are immersive enough to contain most of the properties of real worlds.
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I posted a piece on my blog on this SL / Flickr thing you may find interesting,
hope you like it.
Digital photography and cinema in virtual words (or why Flickr is wrong when dealing with shots from Second Life): http://exploded.awcr.org/FlickrSL