Flickr Changes Policy After 'Obama-Joker' Fiasco

In the light of the whole Obama – Joker fiasco, Flickr has come out as the bad guy and is now trying to at least limit the damages by changing its policy when handling copyright takedown claims. A photoshopped image of the US President Barack Obama, which depicted him as the Dark Knight's version of the popular comic-book villain, was removed from the site after Flickr received a notice from a then-unnamed party.

The story took several turns and twists and started when Firas Alkhateeb, a Chicago resident, created an image of the current president wearing Joker makeup using an earlier Time magazine cover dated October 23, 2006. He then uploaded the altered image to his Flickr account.

Despite him claiming that the photo had no political message and was just a way for him to practice his Photoshop skills, the image started gaining popularity and was altered yet again by an unknown individual by adding the word “socialism” underneath. A printed version of this new photo then began to show up across cities in the US and was also popularized online.

At some point, though, Flickr received a takedown notice, under the DMCA act, for copyright infringement and took down the entire page hosting the original photo. The move instigated a lot of negative comment from bloggers as well as more preeminent figures accusing the site of having a political agenda and claiming that the image could be clearly labeled as political parody and, as such, was free from copyright claims.

Further complicating the matters was the fact that the takedown notice didn't come from any of the possible copyright owners, neither from Time magazine, nor DC Comics, or even the photographer who took the original photo. The notice came from a freelance photographer, with a shady background, and the only “proof” he had was a LiveJournal post dated October 9, a couple of months before Firas posted the image on Flickr. Blog posts can, of course, be backdated, so his claim can't really be verified.

Finally, after all of the media hubbub, Flickr decided to put back the image's page, not the image itself, along with all of the comments. Still, the Yahoo-owned, photo-sharing service says it has learned from this and has now changed its policy regarding takedown notices. From now on, Flickr will only remove the image that is under scrutiny and replace it with a notice, while keeping the Flickr web page of that image intact.