Home >> Internet Life >> FlickrDown: Great Utility or Threat to Intellectual Property?

FlickrDown: Great Utility or Threat to Intellectual Property?

October 28, 2008 By 6 Comments

I caught from Brian Solis—FlickrDown Pulls Pictures from the Cloud to Your PC — bub.blicio.us—and DownloadSquad—posts about FlickrDown and thought, wow that sounds cool until I read this comment on Brian’s post:

Brian, it appears this program allows the download of images even when the photographer does not allow downloads. It also strips the metadata from the photo, which is copyright violation.

So if you want to use if your own images, that’s one thing, but to use it for anyone else, without their permission, is theft.

Umm, whoops. I don’t blame the author, from the looks of it the app hasn’t been touched since June 2007, so it’s probably a project that has fallen by the wayside, but it raises the question of whether or not Flickr will let you block unauthorized downloads.

I turned on right-click save prevention on my SmugMug portfolio as well as not allowing people to buy the images, what about Flickr?

Photographers and other artists have a hard enough time protecting our works, much less earning money from them, now some one could just pull all my images from somewhere and use them? Good thing most of my images are watermarked now, but still.

Maybe I’m just getting my nose bent out of joint for nothing, but then again maybe I’m not…

© Tris Hussey, 2008. Vancouver-based event and portrait photographer. Please see my photography portfolio for examples of my work. Contact me at tris [at] trishussey.com for a quote.

Filed Under: Internet Life, Photography, Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,
  • http://www.tyleringram.com Tyler Ingram

    Disabling the right-click save-as option isn’t totally fool proof. If the person really wants your image after they view it it is in their cache folder.

    They just have to go hunting for it or have an application that will search their cache for items.

    Like mentioned on the PhotoCamp on Granville Island.. if you’re super paranoid don’t upload anything for the public to view! hehe or you can watermark the crap out of photo. I don’t mean adding a watermark to the bottom corner of an image, a proper watermark goes over the image (like on a diagonal) and is really had to remove via photoshop but still allows the person to view the photo.

    Tyler Ingram´s last blog post..Review: Speck 3G iPhone Cases

  • http://www.tyleringram.com Tyler Ingram

    Disabling the right-click save-as option isn’t totally fool proof. If the person really wants your image after they view it it is in their cache folder.

    They just have to go hunting for it or have an application that will search their cache for items.

    Like mentioned on the PhotoCamp on Granville Island.. if you’re super paranoid don’t upload anything for the public to view! hehe or you can watermark the crap out of photo. I don’t mean adding a watermark to the bottom corner of an image, a proper watermark goes over the image (like on a diagonal) and is really had to remove via photoshop but still allows the person to view the photo.

    Tyler Ingram´s last blog post..Review: Speck 3G iPhone Cases

  • http://www.trishussey.com/ Tris Hussey

    Tyler you are totally correct. I’m just raising the issue that maybe Flickr and other sites could try to do more to prevent it. I know it’s a fool’s errand.

    This is really more of a general point and discussion.

  • http://www.trishussey.com/ Tris Hussey

    Tyler you are totally correct. I’m just raising the issue that maybe Flickr and other sites could try to do more to prevent it. I know it’s a fool’s errand.

    This is really more of a general point and discussion.

  • http://daffyduc.wordpress.com/ Dee

    Sites like Flickr should also protect the people that have actually spent the money to use the site aswell. I paid for my account for 2 years upfront. That should stand for something. There are means for them to integrate a better security system for photo theft in there. There should be some protection features in the application for this purpose other than what they have. And other than to watermark the photo as Tyler Ingram had said.

    Thank God that I am not a professional or that I am not super paranoid about someone stealing my photos for their own gain.

    Dee´s last blog post..A Little Thai…Good for the Souls :)

  • http://daffyduc.wordpress.com/ Dee

    Sites like Flickr should also protect the people that have actually spent the money to use the site aswell. I paid for my account for 2 years upfront. That should stand for something. There are means for them to integrate a better security system for photo theft in there. There should be some protection features in the application for this purpose other than what they have. And other than to watermark the photo as Tyler Ingram had said.

    Thank God that I am not a professional or that I am not super paranoid about someone stealing my photos for their own gain.

    Dee´s last blog post..A Little Thai…Good for the Souls :)

TrisHusseyDotCom is Stephen Fry proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache