Yahoo! to sell "creative common licensed" photos for $49 & give $0 to the photographers
Yahoo! owns the photo sharing platform and announced its plans last week. The Wall Street Journal reports the company will start selling prints of 50 million "Creative Commons-licensed" (CC) images on canvas for around $49 each — and no payments will go to the people who actually took the shots. Only a "small sticker bearing the name of the artist" will feature on the canvasses. There will also be some handpicked images, which don't have the CC license. Of those, 51% of sales revenue will go to the photographers in these cases.
Photographers who label photos on Flickr's with the CC category make those images free for commercial use. Anyone can have them. You can take them and sell them if you want, too. Photographers generally offer their work for free like this because it's a good way to get your name out there in a market saturated with cheap/free photos.
The problem is that photographers generally don't expect CC images to be used in a way that makes any money. Yahoo, however, has the power to create a massive market in these images but it is creaming off the CC images (for which no payment is required) and not focusing on the "rights reserved" images which legally require payment.
The effect of this, some photographers believe, will be that artists stop offering their work for free. That would stop Yahoo from selling their images, but it would also stop the free exposure and credit they get when their pictures appear on blogs and news sites (like Business Insider). Yahoo seems not to have taken a more obvious route: to sell CC photos but offer the originators a cut of the sale, the same way Google and Apple offer app developers a cut of sales from apps that are distributed in their apps stores. (Of course, it's much more difficult to verify the original owner of an image than an app.)
One photographer, Jeffrey Zeldman, has written an enraged blog post about the situation, where he calls Yahoo! "cheesy" and "desperate".
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Photographers-Are-Angry-That-Yahoo-Is-Selling-5944698.php