If I make a front end for Flickr that shows people’s public photos, have I “published” those photos, even if it’s completely dynamic?
I got a message from someone who was upset about their photos being “published” on I Hardly Know Her. I had to think about what that word really means, and if anyone’s photos are really “on” my site. They’re served from Flickr, the data comes from Flickr, and the site follows Flickr’s terms of use. There’s no database, nothing is stored except API responses from Flickr (in memcache for a few minutes). There’s no discovery or search mechanism, so someone has to know a person is on Flickr and know their username in order to find them on IHKH.
And yet, I can’t deny that I’m recontextualizing people’s photos. Is that a right you give you up when you join a public photo sharing site with a robust API? The pages on the site don’t exist until someone accesses them, so at what point have I done any “publishing”? Is the potential for republishing something the same as republishing it? If that’s true, then by making a tool to look at Flickr in a different way (something they encourage, by the way) you could argue that I’ve republished every photo on Flickr all at once. That doesn’t seem right. If you’re the first person to look at a user’s photos on IHKH, are you responsible for “publishing” them? After all, you’re the one who brought the page into existence, you typed the username. Is it really “published” if the user can always delete their photos on Flickr or mark them private and thus have them disappear on my site?
I don’t have any hard answers, but I think these questions are interesting. I sent that user a link to Flickr’s setting page to disable API access, and after a week they still haven’t used it, so maybe they’re not entirely sure either.
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