The Last Flickr Photo

More precisely: the last Flickr photo on this blog is the inevitable conclusion to The Last Flickr Friday (May 2018). Of 100 Creative Commons photos on Flickr over the past month, I added three to my Flickr Favorites. This was my favorite of the favorites.

Schach-Figuren am Ufer der Mosel in Ernst © Flickr user Janko Hoener under Creative Commons.

The photographer translates the photo's title as:-

Chess pieces at the bank of River Moselle in Ernst, Germany.

Compared to the 100 Creative Commons photos on Flickr, there were almost 1250 fully copyrighted photos on the same service for the same month. That means I can't use them without requesting permission in writing to the photographer and waiting for a response (that might never come). A blog post isn't important enough to waste that kind of time.

Why would any photographer -- except perhaps a professional with an established reputation to maintain -- not want wide, attributed distribution of his/her work? I don't know, but copyright means just that, the right to copy, and there is no 'fair use' to invoke here. Thank you, Creative Commons!, and thanks to the many photographers who use it to distribute their work.

And so the pieces go back into the box waiting for the next game. Chess games are free; they can't be copyrighted.