Do you like to post screenshots of your avatar from online games on Flickr? If so, are you aware that if your account contains mostly non-photographic images then your images could be prevented from appearing in public areas of the site, including search? That's the finding of a recent Wired article on recent controversy surrounding "Flickr's policy/lack of policy (or murky policy) pertaining to non-photographic images."Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield elaborates by saying that uploading screenshots to Flickr is fine, but he believes that the "rationale is that when people do a global search on Flickr, they want to find photos". However, the line between real and virtual is becoming increasingly blurred; many real-world events are being held simultaneously from inside online games, like the recent virtual Vloggercon held within Second Life. A search for Vloggercon on Flickr yields over 2,500 results but only a couple of dozen from the game event show up.
With the increasing popularity of virtual events, Flickr and other online photo and video storage services must clearly define what content can and cannot be posted online. If one was to take a photo of their monitor displaying a scene from within World of Warcraft and post it on Flickr, would that be any different than posting a screen grab of the same event?
