Find Images to Use and Reuse with the New Creative Commons Filter
- Posted May 26th, 2009 at 9:00 am by Yahoo! Search
- Categories: Multimedia Search, Search
Finding a great image online elicits a little thrill, but it can be tricky – if you’re looking for a pic to pop into a presentation or illustrate a Web page, you need to know if you’re allowed to use that photo, and how you can use it. Today, Yahoo! Image Search is launching a Creative Commons license filter that allows you to simply and quickly find images that are available for reuse.
When you use Yahoo! Image Search, you’ll now see a checkbox for Creative Commons allowing you to filter for images from Flickr that can be used commercially or that can be modified (remixed, tweaked, or built upon) with restrictions set by the image’s creator.
We knew from our March blog post about the release of the Yahoo! Image Search filters that our community wanted an easy way to search for images that could be reused. By launching the Creative Commons license search with Flickr and making it available to all our Yahoo! Image Search users, we aim to promote reusable work and to be transparent about the guidelines issued by the creator of a particular image. We’re proud to be the first image search engine to offer this capability.
Try it and let us know what you think. We bet your next PowerPoint will be prettier than ever.
Polly Ng and Anuj Sahai
Yahoo! Image Search
- 25 Comments
- Subscribe
That’s great, but it would be better if the filter would work. I can see a lot of CC-NC stuff when having choosen commercial usable content.
So does this mean that the image search can only search Flickr photos for CC licenses? Are there any plans to expand beyond Flickr?
Good feature; I think part of the problem though is that Joe Public doesn’t understand that most images that you’d usually find in a page of search results are actually copyrighted in the first place. It’s excellent that you’ve introduced this as a feature, but I can’t help but wonder whether people generally know what ‘creative commons’ is or know the aspects of the different licenses.
Ya, its a great feature. Now I can find images easily which can be used. Great guys….
Nice feature, certainly takes the worry out of copyright infringement. Website designers will enjoy knowing what pictures they can safely use.
This would help us save our images from being stolen by the internet, without giving us the credit.
In addition to the fact that the average joe does not know what Creative Commons even is, inadvertently leaving their images open for all the world to see and use, what controls are in place to ensure that the photos tagged as Creative Commons have not been illegally uploaded to begin with? For example, UserX uploads a picture from the New York Times to reference in a blog post, and doesn’t modify the Creative Commons restriction on that image. It seems that anyone who inadvertently retrieves that image would be liable for copyright infringement.
Yes, the Flickr Terms of Service states that users should not upload images that have copyright restrictions on them, but again, the average joe probably doesn’t know (or care about)the difference. Perhaps the Flickr permission defaults should be set to All Rights Reserved, so that the only people who end up in the creative commons buckets are people who actively opt in.
I agree that many people may not know about the Creative Commons license, but those people aren’t as likely to be in a position to abuse image copyrights on a large scale. For all others that want to stay legal, this is be a great tool.
Nice feature, certainly takes the worry out of copyright infringement. Website designers will enjoy knowing what pictures they can safely use.
Are there any plans to make this available in BOSS?
great feature Yahoo! Image Search is launching a Creative Commons license filter that allows you to simply and quickly find images that are available
Handy! And I don’t even have to install another button or toolbar.
I am the average joe. I didn’t realize some photos are copyrighted. Thanks for the info.
thanks~Now I can find images easily which can be used.thanks~
am the average joe. I didn’t realize some photos are copyrighted
great feature Yahoo! Image Search is launching a Creative Commons license filter that allows you to simply and quickly find images that are available
I like it – I need to know if images are for reuse or protected
Nice resource, but does the function totally eliminate copyright infringement and does it require any additional software?
I do not really understand how images are copyrighted
Wow- although i use Yahoo pretty often, i was never aware about this. BTW, how does this tool know that the pictures has a copyright ownership??
Nice resource, but does the function totally eliminate copyright infringement and does it require any additional software?
I agree that many people may not know about the Creative Commons license, but those people aren’t as likely to be in a position to abuse image copyrights on a large scale. For all others that want to stay legal, this is be a great tool.
That’s great, but it would be better if the filter would work. I can see a lot of CC-NC stuff when having choosen commercial usable content.
Nothing new but still an interesting read though.
great idea i will use it all the time