Why we gave up on Flickr Commons

I thought it might be helpful for other institutions who may be considering joining Flickr Commons to see why Hampshire County Council has finally abandoned the idea.

Our first contact with Flickr Commons came after talking to George Oates at the UKMW in 2008. Her enthusiasm convinced me that we should participate. At that time there were no UK institutional partners.

By June of 2008, we began internal discussions, with the expected concerns around copyright and ownership being expressed by our museums and archives staff. These were overcome by selecting a set of lantern slide images from the 1880s which we were certain had no copyright restrictions and identifying a risk assessment process.

In the meantime George Oates and Flickr had parted ways.

We had also received external advice cautioning involvement due to the differences in UK copyright law with those of the USA and Australia. I spoke with one of the UK institutions by then already partnered with Flickr Commons, who advised on the amendments they’d made to the Flickr Commons standard contract.

In February 2009 we received a very positive email from our new contact at Flickr, looking at a March launch date. Our legal department requested minor amendments to their contract which went to the Yahoo lawyers… and that’s when things began to go wrong.

We didn’t hear back despite a few email reminders until June when we were told “We have some short-term priorities that are consuming the team’s time, and unfortunately this means we need to delay adding more Commons partners until later in the year.” We heard nothing more.

In January I added a tweet to a thread discussing the relative merits of Flickr Commons and Wikimedia Commons. Coincidentally a day or so later I received an email from Flickr thanking me for my extended patience and saying they were starting to “move forward again with partnerships.”

But this time they were unable to accommodate any amendments to the contract, and we decided it was time to quit.