Piracy on the Hudson

Daily Ink

Stored in: In Situ

Posted On: January 16 2009

By: Bryan Partington

Discussing the implications of copyright infringement following major news events could be a bit insensitive after a major disaster, like the US Airways flight 1549 crash into the Hudson river yesterday.

I knew I wanted to write a post about the crash, since a good deal of attention has been directed to how twitter and Flickr members posted the first photos of the disaster. What i found most striking when going through the Flickr search results, was just how many copied and re-posted versions of photos there were. People were uploading images lifted from news sources, or posted to twitter and other services.

Still, some Flickr members were posting their own photos, many of which were comparable in quality to the pool photos that had been illicitly uploaded to Flickr alongside them.

Interestingly, the cross pollination of images runs both ways. The media borrows from the people, and the people borrow from the media. The photographer of the image that illustrates this post noted that CNN had republished his photo in a slideshow on their site. I'm not sure if they had his permission, as the photo was under a non-commercial creative commons license. The photographer has since contacted me to say that permission to re-post was sought by CNN

One photo on Flickr, uploaded by a rescue diver has only one line in its description, "*Do not use this photo without permission*". It's a really good photo from a source close to the action, so he probably has quite a few people asking.

It is interesting to watch the back and forth flow of images play out in the search results and comment on Flickr. You can visualize in your head all the emails, Flickr mails, file nabbing, screenshotting and other methods of securing these photos and republishing them in every available nook and cranny of the web.

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