FlickrFan & Copyright, a Legal Question
I attended Dave Winer’s FlickrFan talk at Yahoo! Brickhouse last night and inadvertently opened a can of worms towards the end of the Q&A session by asking what I thought was a reasonable question on copyright. FlickrFan’s main feature is a screensaver that automatically updates based on RSS feeds containing photos from Flickr, the Associate Press, and any other feed source with image enclosures. The application currently accepts any feed, regardless of whether the photo owner has indicated copyright protection or not. Many photographers on Flickr explicitly mark their photos as “all rights reserved”, meaning that the images shouldn’t be used without the owner’s permission. However, most of those protected images are syndicated through Flickr’s standard RSS feeds. I wondered if FlickrFan users are technically violating copyright law by downloading those protected works to their computer and displaying them as a screensaver. I don’t have a strong opinion on the issue myself. In fact, I think copyright laws need to adapt to reflect media sharing in the digital world (ie. MP3 sharing, video sharing, etc). Nevertheless, I am curious about the law as it is interpreted today.
Any lawyers want to chime in? If a FlickrFan user downloads a copyright-protected photo from a public RSS feed to their computer and displays it as a screensaver, is she breaking the law? If it is a copyright violation, who is responsible? Should the photographer be responsible for opting out of RSS? Should Flickr remove all copyright-protected images from their feeds? Or, is it up to FlickrFan users to make sure they aren’t subscribing to any protected images?
Update: Well, that was fast… Karion replied with a prompt and thoughtful answer to my question. Thanks counselor!
