Saturday is a traditional day for protest marches in London. I’ve been sitting here at my PC for some hours, shielded from the Highgate rain, engaged in a quiet sit-down protest of my own.

The Internet photo-hosting company Flickr recently deleted author Dennis Cooper’s account. They did so in such a coldly destructive and blanket manner that I feel a small boycott is in order on my own part. I have a paid Flickr account myself, so I’ve been carefully removing every single image in my account and re-hosting them elsewhere. It’s taken a while to sort through my old diary entries and change the image links, but I’ve done it all now. No more Flickr-hosted photos in my diary from now on, not if I can help it.

It’s a shame, as the service is otherwise very handy and user-friendly, which is why I happily bought a year’s paid account. Suffice it to say that I won’t be renewing the subscription. It’s like a stationer selling you a scrapbook, then suddenly taking it back after eight months of regular use and tearing up all the pages, purely because they didn’t like what you put in it.

I’ve stopped at deleting my own Flickr account altogether just in case I require it at some point. It’s like rebelling against Rupert Murdoch’s control of things: you’d be silly to boycott watching The Simpsons if you enjoyed it, just because it’s an essential part of the Murdoch empire. I try to use independent bookshops over Waterstones, Amazon and Borders, but it’s hard to ignore a franchise’s 50% discount of an indie bookshop price when you’re living on a limited income. You do what you can according to your own conscience and needs. Living entirely on principles is often a luxury lifestyle choice for those that can afford it.

A little backstory for the uninitiated. Dennis Cooper is an internationally renowned cult author of some decades’ standing. His novels (Closer, Frisk, Try, etc) are often visceral, explicit and darkly funny punk-rock tales of beautiful boys engaged in all kinds of masochistic sex-and-murder situations. Often the stories venture into impossible and surreal dream-like scenarios, continuing in the tradition of De Sade, Octave Mirabeau, William Burroughs, and so on.

His online blog is quite unique: stimulating, intriguing, personal, sometimes shocking, often inspirational. It tends to be illustrated with images of his selection. His readers are curious to know what goes on in his mind and what inspires him, so he obliges us. Some blog illustrations are found images, some are DVD vidcaps, some are from his own camera. At times he uses images which are what the Internet tellingly terms ‘Not Safe For Work’. (Who is this Mr Work person, and why must we care what he thinks, anyway?). It’s the use of others’ images rather than what they depict that is the Flickr reason for deleting Mr Cooper’s entire account, it seems.

In blogs, the use of images which technically belong to others is something that is generally not jumped upon, due to the free-for-all nature of the Web. Everyone does it, usually in the spirit of what magazines call ‘review purposes’. If the copyright holder minds, they should contact the blog author, not the host. The image is not the point – it’s the selection and juxtaposition that matters. Like DJ-ing or making a compilation CD to show the world who you are yourself, or the way you’re feeling, or discussing what interests you. DJs in small clubs don’t tend to pay PRS royalties to the artists whose work they’re spinning, but proper radio DJs do. Likewise Internet blogs versus published books. It’s all quoting and pointing, to make a point.

To put images into their online blog, many people use a third party image-hosting service like Flickr, because it’s terribly easy to use and organize. It now transpires that Flickr take their guidelines for content seriously enough to abruptly terminate Mr Cooper’s entire account without question. It’s so much not their stringent rules that offend me, but the thoughtless manner with which they applied them in this case, deleting everything regardless, including his own personally-taken photos. As the images had become an integral part of Mr Cooper’s blog, it’s difficult not to equate this act with at best nannyish ignorance, at worse vandalisation and book-burning.

Mr Cooper in his blog:
“I tried to reason with Flickr, saying they were destroying eight months of my blog, and that I would delete any offending images if they would just restore my account. But they refused. Honestly, I’m crushed by this. I started this blog casually, but it’s been my central artistic work for months, and now it’s all empty, a ghost, ruins. I’m pretty devastated by it. Silly as it may be, I’ve put a lot of time and energy and ideas into this blog, and to have all those months of work ruined is hard, very hard.”

Mr Cooper’s status as an internationally award-winning novelist, poet and cultural critic means nothing to Flickr. Thankfully, Flickr is not the world. DC DOES mean something to his many readers, students and admirers. The happy ending to this sorry incident is that many DC fans have been clever and kind enough to help restore his blog by pooling their own computer skills and resources.

To my friends out there who use Flickr I say: take heed.

Postscript: I learn later that today’s march in central London was for free speech; calling for freedom, tolerance and that particular quality lacking in Flickr on this occasion: reason.