Above: Political satire image created in Second Life, given a Creative Commons license, and uploaded to Flickr before November 2018
Many virtual world users who upload mass amounts of screenshots to Flickr are concerned that many of them will soon run afoul of the company's new policy limiting free accounts to 1000 images, with images over that number to be deleted (unless a user becomes a Pro subscriber). However, it looks like there's a possible escape hatch for at least some of those images -- the Creative Commons license. As Flickr's CEO just put it in a blog post:
We won’t be deleting anything that was uploaded with a CC license before November 1, 2018. Even if you had more than 1,000 photos or videos with a CC license. However, if you do have more than 1,000 photos or videos uploaded, you’ll be unable to upload additional photos after January 8, 2019, unless you upgrade to a Pro account.
So that implies a Second Life-based image like the one above, by Cajsa Lilliehook, won't be removed. In my observation, most SL screenshots on Flickr ironically carry the default "All rights reserved" tag, however, so this conversation wouldn't apply to them. But a substantial number have a CC tag -- partly because Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig was an early adviser to Second Life, and even appeared in SL on occasion, so the CC concept is fairly well known within the community.
The next question, of course, is if this policy applies only to photos and videos, or also to screenshots and video. And that raises a whole host of follow-up questions:
Almost by definition, a video game screenshot depicts intellectual property that the game's owner generally retains -- meaning you might not be able to CC license screenshots taken in it. But some game companies, most famously Linden Lab, allow their users to maintain IP rights over content they create in Second Life. (That's Lessig's influence.) So in this case, Cajsa is possibly within her rights to CC license such a screenshot.
However, this is very much still unexplored legal territory. As EFF's head lawyer Fred von Lohmann once told me:
"Second Life in some ways is worse than real life." That's because users retain the underlying intellectual property rights to their SL creations. And after all, as Fred pointed out, you can walk down the street in real life without worrying that the textures in the sidewalk are copyrighted. "In Second Life these are gray interesting mysteries" around the law, he added. Something worth considering for people who publish screenshots or machinima extracted from SL. It's been argued that if you run a photo of a Second Life street, you don't really need to get the permission from the creator of every single item in the frame, just as you don't need to do so when you take a photo of a New York City street. However, that assumption has not yet been tested in court.
So I'm not sure Flickr wants to carve out a CC exception for SL images. I'm asking Flickr's CEO and will update this post when I get some clarity.
Hat tip: Gwenette Sinclair.
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