On 9/20/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller(a)gmx.de> wrote:
Jimmy Wales:
How accurate is the metadata at flickr?
Presumably for photos that
people take themselves and upload, it is 100% accurate by definition.
But I worry about copyvios at Flickr leaking into Commons.
The metadata at Flickr is decent, if very POV and personal.
Photographers often tell little stories about how a photo came to be.
Some tags are a bit silly -- for some reason, people feel the need to
tag all their photos with "photo", or with their first name.
I'd also add that a Creative Commons license is NOT the default at Flickr;
you have to explicitly change the license to that. It is possible to change
one's user setup there so that everything you upload gets marked as the
Creative Commons license one chooses, but again, not the default, and too
much effort in general for someone uploading copyright violations.
A bigger problem would be people uploading stuff that's made freely
available by someone else but under a Commons-incompatible license, but has
been incorrectly marked as the 'nearest matching' CC license, out of a
desire to display its free status.
-Matt