>but there are thousands of flickr users who allow full size downloads and permissive license, why is this artists decision notable?

Probably that pros don't do that as much. It's another thing to give pictures for free when you're not selling them anyway, and another to give them for free when making them is your job.

Think of it like your cousin Joe vs Ed Sheeran doing a free concern at the local park.

It’s more like Ed Sheeran giving away free copies of his album rather than free live performances.

Guess so. But whether it's CDs or live shows, the key point is that what this guy is doing is more "news" (or HNews) worthy because he is a pro with a good portfolio, as opposed to some amateurs giving their stuff for free.

I didn't use "albums away for free" because, seriously, hipsters and boomers aside, who buys albums these days?

People like this news, they’re good photos, and that’s all it takes for enough people to upvote. I for one welcome a post that’s beautiful and different. Definitely going to use these as backgrounds.

I can't find much information about him but from his LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/manea-aurel-7775421/) he is not only a talented photographer in Romania but also technical artist for video games as well.

If anyone downloaded already and could setup a torrent that would be nice. These photos are gorgeous, but not sure if he is know for one (or more) in particular.

> If anyone downloaded already and could setup a torrent that would be nice.

That's exactly the kind of thing you can't really do without a clear license, as GP post insinuates.

Thousands of users, and only 0.1% creates normal images, the rest are copying other photographer's style. Silky waterfalls and other repulsing trash like showing homeless people without their consent. Oh, and full moons. Because half moons are not trendy anymore.

Since you are cool with judgement, I'll just point out that photographers have been putting neutral density filters on cameras since long before you were born.

People used to make the same arguments about introducing artificial light. So overdone!

And? The problem is. Someone started shooting running water like this, then the amateurs copied it, and now you can't see a damn waterfall that doesn't have this overused, repulsive look. It's ugly. Just like people can't make a Moon shot that is not a full moon, whyy?

You should launch a site where people can list the things that they've done so that everyone can see a list of things that are Done, knowing that if they try it, they will be embarrassing themselves.

Trying to replicate something that already exists, without adding anything unique to the mix? You mean copying? Then showing it as yours? Does that create any value? Where does that even lead?

I mean if you recreate it in order to learn the technique, that's good.

It's like in the bbc show where they were sawing logs in front of an orangutan and the orangutan copied the action, but didn't really know why.

To be clear I don't have any problems with this photographer's work, just remarked that each and every waterfall looks the same on Flickr.

>there's no mention of making these public domain, so they are only free as in beer, fwiw

the owner would need to grant a license to be free as in beer. These are fully copyrighted, that website is a catalog, and the copyright holder is offering prints for sale. technically, there is no right to download them beyond the browser and browser cache.

> there's no mention of making these public domain, so they are only free as in beer, fwiw

We need labels for "free to train AI models on", at least until/unless the governing bodies declare that all is fair use.

I'm only assuming here but Flickr must be the source of some of the larger image training sets because they do let you filter by license. Most common license is attribution, non-commercial, share-alike (BY-NC-SA), permissive to remixing but yeah doesn't explicitly mention "digest into neural soup"

I think "allow our future AI overlords to learn from your work without royalty or credit" is a hard checkbox to sell for a lot of creators. At one point I moved all my cloud photos* from Google to Adobe Lightroom because the latter did offer a checkbox to the effect of "don't use my photos to train neural nets" (or maybe it was a more innocuous 'improve our future products', I can't recall, but it was explicit enough to make me switch)

*including photos of clouds

Bold of you to assume that the AI trainers would choose to not use material based on the licence.

I wish there was a BY-SA license that applied to AI models.

too late I already trained a model on it