Flickr is known as one of the premier photo Hosting sites where users upload photos to share with others. Now Flickr is finding themselves under attack for removing a picture from a users account (and its not the first time). The picture in question this time is this
Clearly the picture is President Obama made up as the Joker in the Batman movie. OK so your thinking that well I can understand why they would remove that picture. Well yeah I can see why to a point but here is the issue there are plenty of pictures of Bush on Flickr in the same type of depiction but they are allowed to stay. Also the fact that this is not the first picture of Obama that has been removed. Hummm not cool. So why take it down? Well they are crying the DMCA made them do it. Yeah well the whole thing is foul.
Flickr v. Free Speech. Where Is Their Courage?
DMCA abuse is a growing problem on the Internet, and luckily the EFF often comes in to defend people who are unfairly being accused of copyright infringement. And I don’t think there is a lawyer in America who would argue that Alkhateeb isn’t perfectly within his rights to create and distribute this image under fair use and parody defenses.
Yahoo/Flickr should have asked its attorneys if the copyright claim had any validity at all before removing the image, particularly since in this case the image is so clearly non-infringing and also is so politically charged. Yes, Yahoo would have had theoretical liability by not complying if the image was later proven to be copyright infringing. But as I said above, any lawyer could tell you that this is clearly a fair use of the original Obama image, Time Magazine’s copyright and copyright around the movie.
In the past Flickr has deleted accounts of users who are critical of President Obama, but as far as I know nothing like this was done to users who were critical of Bush.
It’s clear that the Flickr team wanted to take this image down. Not only was the image removed, but the entire page was taken down with all the comments to the image. There’s nothing in the DMCA that says you have to do that, too.
Flickr lost my trust over this issue. They failed to stand up for a user who chose to display his work on Flickr over competitors.
They should have had the courage to do the right thing. This is exactly the type of speech that our constitution is supposed to protect. This is not a stolen image. It’s a powerful political expression.
Not cool Flickr - its fine for pictures of Bush that are like this to stay but not Obama....not cool
Yeah America is not real happy I would say. I know I'm not but in the end he is our President and we need to stand strong as a country. Do I think funny pics like this should be removed helllllllllllllllllllllllllllll no - I love them. But yes if you like them then you are labled either Anti-American or racist - neither which I am.
Reminds me of some news article I recently saw, but for the life of me can't dig it back up to post the link. It had pictures of one of our news magazines, I think it was either Time or Newsweek, and they were all for the same month, for example, the version Korea saw, England saw, and some other foreign countries, and they all showed covers of the U.S. in a bad light; us losing the war, treating the world badly, our soliders on the cover doing something "bad", how unpopular we are, etc., and then the cover WE got was of Paris Hiltion, or Britney Spears (something like that, can't remember exactly). It was a real thing, not a joke article. Pretty interesting.
Btw, whoever did that photoshop job on Obama, did a helluva good job, . I made a few Heath Ledger style Joker pics of people, including myself, in Photoshop once, and it's not as easy as you'd think.
found it (yes I am a master googler)
shame on Newsweek
This is not surprising at all, the censorship here is unbelievable, you will always hear a different story in Europe and elsewhere. The U.S. never wants to give their people the real story though.
Olympus
Single & Not Looking
That's kind of always been the theme behind Obama, even during the election run ... if you had anything bad to say about Obama, or simply weren't voting for him, you were chastised. He was treated like the second coming of Christ, and given the huge majority of press coverage, which is kind of funny now considering this article.