Merry Christmas Flickr (The War is Over)

On Tuesday Yoko Ono published a Flickr album with various translations of John Lennon’s famous slogan: ‘War Is Over’.

I immediately liked it. I’ve always been interested in the effect of slogans on popular culture and human psychology (think of the power of Obama’s ‘Yes We Can’) and here was one of the most famous of the twentieth century, republished digitally to coincide with the anniversary of John’s assassination and Christmas.

The only problem was that Yoko – or more likely one of her administrators – had issued each of the images without a creative commons license. Her choice, but the strict license seemed contrary to the spirit of the message and in direct contradiction to her invitation to:

“Print & display in your window, school, workplace, car & elsewhere over the holiday season, and send as postcards to your friends.”

All Rights Reserved – the stiffest of the six creative commons licenses, would have prevented bloggers or website owners from reproducing the image digitally. This, in turn, would have reduced the chances of the images going viral, which I imagine was her intention. The creative commons was, I supposed, just another little quirk of the Internet which needed explaining.

And this is the thing that is wonderful about the Internet:

One email to her Flickr account and an hour later they were all altered.

Easy as that.

So here you go. All 47 images are available with the Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license. Quite a mouthful, I know. But it basically means that you can put them up on your blog or site and as long as you attribute them with a link, then that’s quite alright.

It’s sharing and crediting – two key characteristics of Web 2.0.

This will be the last blog post for My Digital Notebook in 2009.  I’m off on Sunday on the Africa Rally. The first year for this blog has been a quiet one; I’m planning for much more next year. Merry Christmas everyone – (the War Is Over).

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image credit: Yoko Ono Official