An altered photo pulled from Flickr and posted in a Tribune Interactive gallery (and on Poynter Online) illustrates a couple of the challenges news organizations face in posting user-generated content -- authenticity and copyright.
The photo, of a
crying child in front of a tombstone of Santa Claus, was included in a gallery called "
Awkward Tombstones." Poynter Online used that photo to illustrate an E-Media Tidbits post by Will Sullivan about
Tribune Interactive's practice of culling photos from Flickr for its photo galleries.
I thought the photo looked odd, so I asked Sullivan about it, and he quickly found
a Snopes.com item debunking it. (According to Snopes, the photo of the boy was a stock image, and the site showed a billboard that used the same one.)
Brandi Larsen, director of content for Tribune Interactive, took the photo out of the gallery after I asked her about it. "We just would never run doctored photos, and we've taken it down, and we will look into how we handle Flickr and Creative Commons in the future," she said.
"I think any time you have user-generated content in any form, there is the consideration of 'Where is this photo coming from?' " Larsen said.
In her interview with Sullivan, Larsen said that Tribune uses images that are available under a Creative Commons license, which enables others to use work free of charge, with certain restrictions.
In this case, though, the Flickr user who posted the photo,
Jurvetson, didn't have the right to distribute it -- even on his own Flickr account -- because he didn't create it, said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University. In a
comment posted below the image, Jurvetson wrote, "Yes, a chain mail classic from a couple years ago. I should mention that I did not take/make this photo, and I have no idea where it came from. But it made me burst out laughing, and so I wanted to share it."
Tribune Interactive and Poynter unintentionally violated copyright law by publishing the image, Ardia said. (Using the photo to illustrate copyright issues would probably be allowed, he said.)
"News organizations need to realize they are taking on trust a license that may or may not be valid" if they use such images without contacting the user, he said. "Probably most of the photos uploaded to those sites are by the original photographer, but not all."
"We're learning what 'verify' means in this context," Ardia continued. "Does it mean taking at face value what someone says on their Flickr account, or does it mean more than that? For news organizations, I think verification probably means more than that, from a journalism ethics standpoint."
Correct. The photo was removed after I raised the issue...
