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Clixta: A copyright-friendly way to share your family photos

Copyright Hub finally issues something useful

“Imagine if a Facebook rival emerged that didn’t require users to surrender their rights, and that rewarded them for their creativity with real dosh. Who’d want to stick around with the old Facebook that doesn’t do either?” we mused last year.

Well, although it isn’t pretending to be a Facebook rival, or pay you, something halfway to that goal launched in London yesterday: a photo sharing social network for families and friends' personal photo archives called Clixta.

It’s one of the first of more than 90 Copyright Hub projects to go public. Clixta’s avowed purpose is to digitise and share your ancient family photos, the sort which remain in dusty shoe boxes.

You can share photos privately with Flickr today, and password protect the collection, but it’s cumbersome and inflexible. And just try uploading a photo to the Daily Mail, the BBC, or Google, and any user ID metadata will be stripped. It’s a world without property rights. Clixta ensures each photo has a unique ID.

“We can unearth a social history archive that only exists under people’s beds,” Clixta co-founder Dean Newsome told us. “It’s about taking that shoebox and making it safe and sharing them with family and friends”.

Social institutions, such as football clubs, are also mines of valuable photos that have never been digitised. Clixta adds a persistent connection between the user and their photo, via metadata rather than DRM-style locks and keys.

“One of the reasons people don’t put stuff online is the worry of losing control. It’s their heritage and friends,” said Hub CEO Dominic Young.

“Clixta was impressive from the very beginning of not trying to play the internet game of taking from users and never giving back. And they’ve done it. It liberates people from the tyranny of losing control,” he added.

Users can upload, crop, annotate and share the images. Clixta has fine-grained privacy controls: not many family photos scream out to be shared on Twitter, co-founder Shaun Cutler explained, the idea is to share them amongst friends or groups.

“Historical societies want to share their old images but they don’t" explained Cutler. "One is technology – the fear of technology itself, such as Facebook or the terms and conditions Facebook require. And the confusion with copyright, about what they can and can’t do. They just don’t find it easy."

Clixta allows contributors to define their own T&Cs.

Young said the Hub had come about because it had “identified a dysfunction in the way traditional copyright works.” To replicate analogue copyright in the digital world would be a huge missed opportunity, he said.

There’s been a long wait for Hub news since its launch last summer, when it touted some 90+ projects being incubated in the pipeline, all tapping in, in some way, to the Hub’s open source code. The Hub is expected to open-source the Clixta code any day now.

Web and tablet versions will be available as well as an API for plugging in other web services. You can find it here, complete with links to the Apple Store and Google Play store. ®

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