…at Flickr.
Who asked to take this down, and who decided? Flickr has a right to censor its own site, if it wishes, but we have a right to know that’s what they’re doing, and not let them hide behind the skirts of DMCA.
[Thursday afternoon update]
Per a comment, I worded that badly. I don’t mean that we literally have a right. I simply meant that if they expect us to use their service, there should be more transparency in their policies.
Flickr has a history of mismanagement, including politically correct censorship and the ignoring of copyright violations and outright IP theft. Remarkably, Flickr forbids overt commercial activity (you may promote your business by posting a portolio of your images, but you are not allowed to sell images or services through Flickr), which is insane. It’s the most popular photo network, potentially one of Yahoo’s most valuable properties, potentially a huge source of commission revenue to Yahoo, and it’s crippled by the cluelessness of the people in charge.
> … we have a right to know that’s what they’re doing …
WTF? How did we acquire such a right?
Well, Yahoo does have a long history of taking good ideas and so mismanaging them that they actually end up losing money and self-destructing. Let us remember Yahoo invented the search engine craze. By all rights they should be sitting where Google is sitting, but they’re not.
Frankly, I’m convinced that in a world where all transport was by foot or sledge, someone could invent the wheel and give the idea to Yahoo, and Yahoo would contrive to lose money on the deal and so discredit the idea of wheels that someone else would have to re-invent them. Never buy Yahoo stock, except as a present to your enemies.
A Facebook friend of mine was suspended — without any reasons given — from posting on FB. He had a FB Group called “Barack ORhetoric,” which was mostly just silly stuff. But he never posted anything offensive (at least to me, and I’m pretty sensitive to offensive…). He had, however, sent a lot of e-mail to flag@whitehouse.gov. I wonder if the two are connected…