The more that comes out of the flap over Flickr’s move to delete the Obama-as-Joker parody image, the more it appears that the photo site may not be telling the truth. A report on Tuesday by Photo District News shows that nobody contacted Flickr about the image as far as a copyright claim goes.
Time? Said it never made a request for the image to be taken down. DC Comics, owner of the Joker character? No, they didn’t ask either. How about the photographer who took the picture? They didn’t even know there was any controversy surrounding the image.
So who asked for the image to be taken down, as the site gave in a response a week ago? Apparently nobody with a legal right to. With PDN’s reporting, it is now almost completely clear the site acted on its own to remove the imagery.
What makes it bad here is now the site looks like it has lied. Add to this folks like Thomas Hawk have jumped on it like a hawk (no pun intended), and it is quickly becoming a public relations nightmare for the company.
As Hawk writes:
I will say though that if Flickr staff knows that the DMCA takedown request is bogus and is now using it to deflect criticism against them over their censorship act that this would actually not be an open and honest way to communicate with their users at all, that this would in fact be a disingenuous and dishonest way to communicate with them.
It’s time for Flickr to speak. Allowing this to degenerate further into a morass of speculation only feeds the idea that Flickr may be in the Adminstration’s back pocket cause of it’s use of the site’s services.
By the way, PDN points out that at least three copies of the original image have now surfaced on Flickr since the controversy began over the deletion of the image. Why aren’t these coming down?
#1 by Ben Atkin on August 27, 2009 - 1:37 pm
When Heather posted the comment about DMCA, was she in a position to give an official statement on it, or was she just a customer service rep trying to field a P. R. question? It seems that they could argue that she was incorrect, but that when they released the official statement citing “copyright concerns” they were acting under the TOS, not the DMCA, and therefore their official P. R. has their story right.
#2 by Ed Oswald on August 27, 2009 - 1:41 pm
Ben, good point. Typically in touchy PR situations like this, my experience has been that the company and the PR person will work closely in order to ensure something like what you explain doesn’t happen — because in the end, that could look even worse.
Either way, you’re bringing up a good point.