An open letter to flickr/yahoo

I just read the newly posted flickr community guidelines. Listed under the DON'T section (as in, this is bad and we don't like it) is this little bit of conservative rhetoric.

Don't -
Upload photos that include frontal nudity, genitalia or anything else that your bathing suit should cover in public areas of Flickr
If you do we'll make your photostream private and remind you of this Guideline. If you don't heed our warning and continue to make similar content public, we'll terminate your account without warning. This applies to your Buddy Icon as well.


So, I just sent flickr this letter.

I just finished reading through your newly posted community guide lines and I must say that I'm very disappointed.

For the most part all the rules are common sense, intelligent, and generally pleasing; all except the rule, DONT'T "Upload photos that include frontal nudity, genitalia..." For me, flickr is a tool that helps me become a better photographer, to hone my art, and be inspired. Some of my favorite contacts are professional photographers who make a living creating art. On occasion some contacts have posted wonderfully artful and thought provoking pictures that just happen to include a penis or a vagina.

In a world that is - more and more I fear - hell bent on making things clinical and sterile, it comes as a rather upsetting shock that flickr (a company that has blazed its own path and went against the grain) is following the same narrowing road. Freedom is the ability to censor for oneself what the individual is exposed to; what one reads, sees, hears, and feels. With this newly posted rule flickr/yahoo has went down the road of censorship; something I had never envisaged flickr would do. I sincerely hope that flickr won't start requiring that pictures be approved as well.

I'd like to think that right now flickr has a user or two that might be the next Robert Maplethorp. A rule such as this one puts limits on creativity and decreases its uselessness as an artistic outlet. Art cannot be encumbered by conservative notions of decency.

I have been using flickr since the beginning and I love it; it is a part of my life and my rutine. I ask that this rule be stricken from the community guidelines as to afford people that ability to make decisions for themselves, and so that art may prosper.

Sincerely
Wade Kelly

Wader