Case Studies/Flickr
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Overview
Launched in 2004 and later acquired by Yahoo, Flickr is an image (and recently video) hosting website that allows users to post, share, and comment on each other's content. These photos are organized by user-submitted tags, which generate emergent folksonomies of thematically linked photos. Users can also create photo pools, which allow others to submit images into publicly available repositories. Notably, the site also allows for Creative Commons licensing support in its service, allowing creators to share certain rights for usage of their photos with others. As of late 2007, the site hosts over two billion images.
Some relatively outdated statistics suggest that, by 2005, the site had acquired 775,000 registered users, though judging by Flickr's growth in the 2 years since then, this number is likely no longer accurate. Furthermore, data on how this user base is distributed worldwide remains unclear. However, Flickr has been notably used by activists to compile and publicize events. Clay Shirkey's “Here Comes Everybody” details the role played by Flickr in circulating photos of political protests in Belarus (p. 167). Similarly, Flickr users organized onsite protests against Microsoft's attempted buyout of Yahoo in 2008.
License Usage
Users can choose to release their work under any of the available Creative Commons licenses.
Flickr has also published its shapefile dataset online, waiving all copyright restrictions via the CC0 public domain waiver. A shapefile is a file containing shapes mathematically generated by thousands of Flickr geotagged photos of particular neighborhoods, countries, and continents. Shapefile data has been used to reverse-engineer maps with user generated longitude and latitude coordinates that are then demarcated by Where-On-Earth IDs, "unique numeric identifiers that correspond to the hierarchy of places where a photo was taken: the neighbourhood, the town, the county, and so on up to the continent" (http://code.flickr.com/blog/2008/10/30/the-shape-of-alpha/).
Motivations
Jon Phillips, who worked closely with Flickr on CC integration, commented that open licensing was useful in "providing an interface with the rest of the world and the blogosphere without having to ask permission. It provided, in short, a clear path to usage."
Media
Some collections from Creative Commmons affiliates give a good sense of the type of material collected:
