A debate has recently been going on in the swedish blogosphere regarding one of the newspapers in southern Sweden’s decision to embed a Flickr slideshow of the latest photos from Haiti in one of their articles. The slideshow included all kinds of images – both creative commons licensed and others – which some people in the blogosphere reacted negatively upon.

It’s an interesting issue. Flickr’s terms and guidelines clearly states that such a use isn’t permitted – especially not for a commercial newspaper. Flickr however fails to clearly communicate that limitation in connection to their copy and pasteable embed code giving people the impression that Flickr has secured the necessary rights to allow such an embed – which it in contrast to eg. YouTube and Twitter hasn’t.

Flickr’s default license is for everything to be “All rights reserved” – but what that means isn’t clearly communicated. In their terms they only secure the rights to use images on other public Yahoo sites. That a Creative Commons license allows more than that is described by linking the license to a Creative Commons deed – but the “All rights reserved” has no description at all. Big sites like Flickr shouldn’t force people to read long terms to understand what they’re allowed to do – Flickr should describe that up front and especially so when they’re implying that it’s allowed by showing embed codes.

Figuring out how content can be used becomes even harder with new technical standards where the websites themselves handles the content instead of you. One example is the OEmbed standard which allows for easy embedding of content, which WordPress 2.9 support and which I have created a Drupal module for, doesn’t contain any way of identifying the license of embeddable content – still both sites like Flickr and YouTube supports it. I’m always allowed to embed a YouTube video – but I have no way to determine whether I’m allowed to embed the Flickr image or not, which makes automatic embeds upon discovery very tricky from a legal perspective.

Creative Commons and the Microformats community has both done a good work of creating standards and API:s for websites to be able to identify the license of content themselves – but I think the adoption of it has been somewhat limited among content creators.

I’ve suggested on the OEmbed mailing list that a license attribute similar to the rel-license microformat should be added to the OEmbed standard – that would solve the situation for OEmbed. For manual embeds copy and pasted from the embed providers the providers has to be more clear with what rights you have to use that embed – something similar to Creative Commons deeds perhaps?

Image is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike and created by qthomasbower on Flickr.