Did Flickr Delete Obama Joker Image After Receiving Fake Takedown Notice?

27
Aug

Did Flickr Delete Obama Joker Image After Receiving Fake Takedown Notice?

author: editor category: ReadWriteWeb

The story surrounding the infamous Obama Joker picture and how Yahoo’s Flickr photo sharing service deleted it after it received a DMCA takedown notice is getting stranger by the day. According to photo blogger Thomas Hawk, who actually saw the name on the takedown notice that Flickr shared with the original poster, the name is likely “totally bogus.” This is quite a disturbing development, especially because it has now become clear that Flickr does not verify the authenticity of the DMCA takedown notices it receives.

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What Do We Know?

If you didn’t follow the developments in this case closely, here is a quick recap: Firas Alkhateeb, a 20-year-old student in Chicago, created an image that showed President Obama wearing the makeup of the Joker from the last Batman movie. To do so, he used an image of Obama that appeared on the cover of Time magazine on October 23, 2006. According to the LA Times, he uploaded this picture to Flickr on January 18, 2009. By August, someone added the word “socialism” underneath the picture and it was widely circulated among political bloggers and also started to appear on posters at political rallies.

So far, so good. Even if you don’t agree with the politics behind this picture, this is what the online mashup culture is all about. By the middle of August, however, Flickr received a DMCA takedown notice, claiming that the image infringed on somebody’s copyright. Complying with the law, Flickr deleted the image from Alkhateeb’s account. The problem, however, is that Flickr never shared who actually initiated the takedown notice.

Fake Takedown Notices on Flickr: They Work

It is starting to become clear now that the takedown notice Flickr and Alkhateeb received was completely bogus. According to Thomas Hawk, it didn’t even feature the name of somebody who owned the copyright to any part of the image. PDN has verified that neither Time magazine, nor DC Comics, nor the photographer who took the Time magazine cover image filed this claim. These are the parties that could potentially claim that their copyright was violated by this image, even though because this is a parody, their legal claims would be on shaky ground. Instead, the name of the document, according to Hawk, is “bogus.”

To make matters worse, Flickr user 3e actually verified that Flickr really doesn’t check the names on these notices. 3e just submitted a claim to take down one of his own pictures with a “once-off email address, using the name ‘Joe Blow’ and giving no identifying information other than an obviously fake address ("Anytown, USA").” Flickr happily obliged and 3e’s photo was gone within hours.

If you don’t like a picture on Flickr for any reason, you can just have it deleted by sending a DMCA takedown notice. We can only hope that Flickr will institute a better verification process in the near future.

As of now, Flickr doesn’t even have the capability to restore an image after it was deleted. YouTube, which probably has to deal with far more DMCA takedown notices every day than Flickr, at least offers users a recourse to have videos restored if the copyright claim can’t be verified.

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