What’s Wrong With Flickr Profiting From Your Images?

Nothing.

Or let’s just call it a charming twist of fate. You see, this past week some photographers vented their anger at Flickr for a perfectly legal maneuver. Or let’s call that, a smart maneuver. What happened?

Some photographers have uploaded their images to Flickr and deliberately selecting a Creative Commons license that grants users full commercial use of these images. Good enough. The “problem” of course is that it struck Yahoo Inc. (owner of Flickr) that it could profit from the printing and sale of these same commercially licensed images.

So there’s not really a problem here, much less a legal issue. This is a funny case of seeing no problem with dishing out free food to whomever wants it — and as much food as any one person wants, and then finding out that the same free food you handed out is being sold for a profit by the same food taker. This might hurt your feelings, or you may think the world immoral and unethical, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with selling off that food for a profit, or with what Flickr is doing.

At the end of the day there is one way to lick those “free culture” wounds…change the Creative Commons license.