John wrote: >That looks like the boilerplate, catch-all phrasing that's in Flickr's >T.O.S. to keep you from suing them if some third party steals your photo >from their site. You can still sue the third party, but you're agreeing >that whatever happens, it's not Flickr's fault. > >Plus it gives them the leeway to move photos around from one server farm >to another and gives them a reasonable amount of time to propagate the >removal of your images from Flickr's servers if/when you close your account.
You got it. Almost all the objectionable items in these Terms of Service agreements are basically there as CYA material to protect the web service or social media site from litigious users and downloaders. No online service is going to sell your images to a third party even if their TOS technically allows them to because it's too risky: Flickr/Facebook/whoever can never be certain that the person who uploaded the image is really the copyright owner. If someone uploads an image that isn't theirs (which happens all the time) they can't grant legal any permissions for the use of that image no matter what the TOS says. Furthermore, in addition to copyright there's the matter of a model release if the image in question shows a recognizable person (as exemplified in the Flickr/Virgin Wireless debacle a few years back). http://www.robertstech.com/blog/?p=327 -- Mark Roberts - Photography & Multimedia www.robertstech.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
