So you might have heard about this great flickr backlash going on in the mommy blogging community. And if you’ve been to my site recently (and not just hung out on Google Reader, which I understand because I do that myself), you may have noticed the pictures in my sidebar from flickr and in my header have changed. If you’ve been keeping track, you probably know why. I’m not going to go back over the details that others ahead of me have stated so well. The short of it is: people are stealing pictures of other people’s children and using them for themselves or in marketing. And that’s not good.
I’ve always had the strictest Creative Commons license Flickr offers on my photos; Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works. Which means that people are free to to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as they attribute the work and do not use it for commercial purposes or alter, transform, or build upon the work. Whew. Sounds complicated, right? Basically means you can pass the picture around as long as you give me credit, don’t use it to make money or change the picture in any way. Sounds like I’d be covered doesn’t it? And you’d think I would be. But this is the internet and it’s full of all sorts of douchbags and you never know what someone is going to do with your pictures. And normally, I probably wouldn’t care or even worry too much. After all, I’m pretty small potatoes over here.
But where my children are involved… that’s where I have a problem. I shudder at the of anyone doing anything to my children, even if it is just a photo of them. That I am not okay with. And listen, I know that mommy blogging is inherently laden with these issues. Where do we draw the line? What is okay and not okay to share about your child’s lives? At what point do the silly stories infringe upon their privacy, etc and so forth.
I don’t share everything about my children. Believe it or not! I do keep some things to myself, especially about Harrison now that he’s getting older. That’s why it may not seem like I talk about him as much as I do about Liam. Do I wonder if I made the right decision to share their names and pictures on the internet instead of remaining anonymous? Sometimes. But I do believe, at least for now, that my choices were good ones. Hopefully I won’t learn any differently.
So in the meantime, I’ve set the viewing privileges on all my photos of Harry and Liam (or at least almost all of them) to friends and family only. Thank goodness for Flickr’s fabulous organizer and batch operations because otherwise that might have taken me for freakin’ ever to do. If you’d like to continue to be able to see these pictures from my flickr page (sorry, they still won’t show up in my sidebar), and you aren’t already a contact labeled as a “friend”, either add me as a friend or drop me a comment here with your flickr id and I’ll add you to my contact list. I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do and this was a very easy decision for me to make.
