David Emery Online

Photocopy

17 August 2008

Today I’d like to talk a little about copyright, Flickr, fair use and thumbnails.

On the XL Recordings website that we launched back in March we pull in news, videos and photos from a variety of sources in a tumblelog-style. Most of these are from sources we run or control like band websites, myspaces, youtube profiles or from sites we have good relationships with. The only exception of that is the photos we pull in from Flickr, which mostly come in from the main Flickr groups for each artist (here’s Radiohead’s one, for example).

When we designed the site I was very wary about making some kind of semi-official spam-blog – a spam-blog being a blog packed with advertising that passes off someone else’s content as their own, normally using an RSS feed. So, to that end we made sure that it was really obvious where the content was coming from and added prominent links back to the original sources. In the case of photos, we only use 75×75 pixel thumbnail, each of which links back to the original photo on Flickr. I thought we had stuck a good balance between respecting the authors of the original content and finding the most interesting content relating to our bands.

However, a group of photographers on Flickr (mostly) think otherwise:

Concert Photography / Discuss / xlrecordings.com – have a read, it’s quite interesting the range of different viewpoints that come through.

Now, I’m not one to piss people off on the internet (at least when it comes to things like this) so I’ve made it so we now don’t pull from any public groups – instead we’re going to set up additional groups for each band that state clearly that any photos posted to that group will also go on the XL site (example). It seems like a reasonable compromise, although it’s a slight shame as obviously we’re not going to have so many photos on the site.

This is such a grey area, I think – from a legal point of view less so, as any fair use exemptions that their are don’t really think in terms of photo thumbnails and links back to the original site. However, I think what we were doing was entirely reasonable; it would have been completely different if we were using full size photos, not linking back to Flickr or trying to pass them off as our own. I’d be really interested to hear other people’s thoughts on this.