Flickr Deletes Obama Controversial Photo by Mistake

Photographer Thomas Hawk and PDN Pulse reveal that Flickr might have deleted the photo due to a loophole in its copyright policy, but Mr. Hawk makes a strong case when accusing Flickr of being politically incorrect when it comes to favoring the recent United States president.

The whole affair started when a Chicago native student, Firas Alkhateeb, created an image of president Obama wearing the Joker's make-up from the recent Batman - Dark Knight movie. The picture was a modification of a Time Magazine cover from 2006, and soon became a hit among Flickr users, bloggers and political fanatics.

The picture was so successful that it showed up at any rally against president Obama's Government, as activists embraced the image as a sign of the future to come. After about 20,000 views on Flickr only, on August 14, the photo sharing website suddenly removed the photo from Alkhateeb's profile page citing copyright infringements of the DMCA license.

Two weeks after the incident, new details arose, depicting the events that happened those days. According to Thomas Hawk, a photographer from San Francisco, he actually saw the name on the Flickr takedown notice and characterized it as “totally bogus.”

PDN Pulse, a photography news website, also reports that after contacting Time Magazine, the photographer that took the Obama photo and DC Comics, owners of the Joker character, none of them issued a copyright infringement complaint on Flickr for the Obama Joker photo.

Mr. Hawk also points out that over a period of eight years while George W. Bush was president of the United States, only five articles were published on the Flickr official blog containing his name. On the other hand, after about nine months in office, Barack Obama has racked up no fewer than 75 articles on the same blog.

Maybe a more realistic explanation for this entire Obama ordeal was supplied by the ReadWriteWeb blog that presented a study performed by a Flickr user named 3e, that uploaded a photo and reported it himself under a fake name. He used an offensive name in the complaint and entered “Anytown, USA” in the location field.

The complaint was submitted under the same DMCA License infringement as the Obama photo, and after a few hours, the reported picture was removed from his account. This only goes to prove that Flickr does not verify in any way license infringements, and maybe the photo was really taken down by a Flickr blunder, and not by an Obama fan inside the company.