Is flickr evil?

I used to have the warm and fuzzies about flickr, but these days I've begun to wonder if they're evil. Presumably they were turned into zombie brain-eating evil bastards after being consumed by Yahoo!.

I recently found that one of my photos that I had posted on flickr had been posted to a third party website to accompany an article. The website gave me credit and obeyed flickr's rules that they must post a link to the photo on flickr.

There's only one "small" detail that they neglected to consider: all of my flickr photos are copyright me, with all rights reserved. But they did not request my permission to use the photo on their site! It was only by accident that I discovered that they had violated my copyright. Presumably the copyright violation was unintentional, otherwise they wouldn't have posted my name right next to the photo. Ironically, it would have taken them half a minute to ask me for permission to publish, and I would have enthusiastically replied "yes!".

Jim Goldstein has written a detailed article describing what he feels is a malicious neglect of flickr to enforce copyright rules.

It will be an incredible nuisance to either nuke my flickr account or make my photos private. The whole point of uploading my photos to a site like flickr is to make it possible for me to share my stuff with the world (but not for the world to violate my legal rights!). It's not like I'm a professional photographer, with photos that knock your socks off, so the theft of my rights is not hugely damaging to me. But it still hurts, and there are other flickr users who feel much worse about the situation, as is clear from the comments in response to Goldstein's post.

I like the idea of photo-sharing sites, and I don't see why third parties find it such a problem to simply ask for permission to use flickr photos from their owners. I hope flickr does something to rectify this situation soon. I'm going to begin looking for a site that pays more than lip service to protecting the copyright of content owners.