An interesting report from PDNPulse yesterday regarding the latest in the Flickrgate case of why Flickr decided to censor student Firas Alkhateeb’s image of the Obama Joker. You’ll remember that the image caused all the uproar (here’s a list of most places where the story ran) last week after Flickr was reported to have removed the controversial image from Alkhateeb’s stream and their site.

Flickr’s defense of their removal of the image eventually came from Community Manager Heather Champ (in a Help Forum thread that has subsequently been shut down) who told Flickr users that the reason why the image was removed was that someone filed a DMCA request to take it down.

“In this intance, the Yahoo! Copyright Team here in the US received a complete Notice of Infringement as outlined by the DMCA (Digitial Millenium Copyright Act),” stated Champ trying to deflect blame for the deletion on the controversial law. Champ added, “There appears to be a whole lot of makey uppey going in the news and blogosphere about this event.”

But now PDN is saying that they have contacted spokespeople at TIME Magazine, DC Comics, and the photographer who took the original image for Time Magazine, Platon, and all are denying having filed a DMCA takedown notice against this image. Apparently the photographer Platon’s office wasn’t even aware of the Obama/Joker issue.

So if TIME Magazine, DC Comics and Platon didn’t file a DMCA takedown notice against the image, who did? And if someone with no possible IP interest in the image filed it, wouldn’t it be a tad disingenuous at this point for Flickr staff to be hiding behind this takedown notice in justifying their act of censorship? No wonder why when they were asked by the Los Angeles Times *who* filed the DMCA takedown notice, they were told that Flickr wasn’t able to give this information out. Aren’t able to give this information out or won’t give this information out?

Read entire article

The Emergency Election Sale is now live! Get 30% to 60% off our most popular products today!