All is not well in Flickr land

Flickr is taking a lot of heat from its userbase for its high-handedness in unilaterally deleting a photographer's (Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir) online plea for support after discovering that many of her photos had been sold without her knowledge or authorisation by a third-party site. Here's the background to the story as narrated by Thomas Hawk (photographer, Flickrite and CEO of Zoomr - Flickr competitor) :

Rebekka is a single mom and art student living in Iceland. She's an artist and a talented one at that. She does amazing things with her camera. Recently she discovered that a gallery Only-Dreemin had been ripping her off. They'd sold thousands of dollars worth of her images and when she caught them and tried to make them give her the money that they stole from her they refused. So Rebekka did what anyone with a following on the internet might do and she posted about her frustration and plight on her flickrstream. And her story resonated loudly with the flickr community. Her story made the front page of digg and by days end she had 100,000 views on this particular photograph with hundreds of supportive comments.

Apparently Flickr removed Rebekka online plea and the associated discussion thread on the grounds that "Flickr is not a venue for to you harass, abuse, impersonate, or intimidate others. " Most would agree that Flickr appears to have taken a rather hard line application of their policies without due consideration of the circumstances of Rebekka's grievances. The latest development is that according to Rebekka, Flickr has since apologised for its previous actions though Rebekka did not publish the contents of the apology.

Lesson learned - don't upload high quality versions of your photos to any online site (including your own) and always watermark your photos to prevent theft.