Is Flickr losing its Creative Commons roots?

I’m a big flickr user, I post all sorts of stuff and I post it all as Creative Commons licensed. I’m even generous and license at quite a low level of Creative Commons control – Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic. in simple terms, what this means is that someone can use my pictures as long as they use them for non-commercial work and they give me credit. I’ve even had people asking to use pictures for commercial work, which I have given without fee.

There was a time when I could search through flickr and be reasonably sure that what I was looking at was also licensed as Creative Commons. It was the place that I would go to to get hold of good quality photos for a project I might be working on, as long as I respected the Creative Commons license I could be confident in using the pictures.

I have no statistics to support this, but my perception is that more and more of the content on flickr is now locked down to “all rights reserved”. Flickr does a really good job of protecting these pictures – you can’t download them and you only see one size.

I fully understand a couple of reasons for locking down content in this way:

• You wouldn’t want anyone messing about with your personal pictures.
• You might not want anyone using all of your pictures when it’s your business.

But there are many, many pictures that are locked down which aren’t either of these, they are pictures of scenes, or of items and events which are not of any value to them, nor that much value to anyone else.

What value does locking them down have? It just takes value away. if it’s locked down you can only see a small representation of it; no-one gets to enjoy the real full fidelity picture, no-one gets to download it and use it as a background or in a screen-saver, no-one gets to use the picture in a project to create something new and exciting.

Perhaps I’m just being some kind of liberal creative commons open source hippie but it feels like flickr is loosing its roots, loosing its sole? (did I really just say that, oh dear)

I feel like turning my stuff to “all rights reserved” – why should I share my stuff if no-one else is willing to share their stuff? “I’m not sharing my ball if you won’t share yours”. Perhaps that would be a good feature – my stuff is licensed as Creative Commons to everyone who’s pictures are also Creative Commons, if your stuff is “all rights reserved” then, to you, so is mine.

Why do people have to be so protective of stuff? Do they really think it has a value that people are willing to pay? Do they not realise that sharing is good for them.

Gosh I’m grumpy for a Friday.

Thankfully flickr advanced search enables you to search by license type, but I’m not sure why I should need to.

(Jimmy and Grandad are Creative Commons too)