Stewart Butterfield has been named one of Businessweek’s Top 50 entrepreneurs and TIME’s 100 most influential people in the world, and he appeared on the cover of Newsweek in 2006. As co-founder of the popular photo sharing website Flickr, Butterfield has had a hand in re-landscaping the world of photography and digital media as we know it. I had the privilege of sitting down with him during his visit to Dartmouth, where he delivered the Portman Lecture in the Spirit of Entrepreneurship in April of this year. 

WM: Flickr enables budding talent to compete in the marketplace for the public attention that was once dominated by professional artists. Do you think this development will bring more grassroots artists into the marketplace and win them a greater share of compensation for their work, or do you think it will force more and more professionals to offer their content for free?

SB: I’ll answer that in two parts. First, let’s ignore the compensatory aspects of it. I do a lot of public speaking and one of the things I’m always asked to talk about is Web 2.0. I have this funny series of slides that shows a Renaissance family gathered in their parlor with lutes and a harp and some other instruments. At one point, if you wanted to listen to music you got the family together and you went down to the parlor and you played music together. The idea that creative expression is something that you either purchase or is made available to you by professionals is relatively new. It’s really a 20^th century phenomenon—post-radio, post-phonograph, post-television, etc. Web 2.0 is actually in part a return to the way things used to be, where that kind of creative expression is available to everyone.

The distinction between the professional and amateur photographer certainly makes sense in that there are certain people who make a living by taking pictures of stuff—you know, whether they’re journalists or they do commission work for magazines or take photos of celebrities at the Oscars.

So about the money…the biggest reason people take photographs is not the expectation of compensation—besides maybe the nice feeling you get when somebody else appreciates what you’ve created. But obviously Flickr still has a big impact on the professional marketplace for photographs.

It’s not as straightforward as you’d think though. When you’re taking pictures of the Oscars or NASCAR racers, there’s something besides the skill of using the camera that goes into that. It involves being represented by an agency, getting credentialed, and getting access to those events. Not everybody gets to take a camera up to the velvet rope at the Oscars or into the pit at the speedway or into the press room at the White House.

Most amateurs also don’t take photos that are considered suitable for commercial work. There’s a whole set of rules you need to follow when you’re taking pictures for advertisements. Pictures for editorial use—that’s where Flickr presents a challenge to the general market. Professionals who license their photographs for journalistic uses or for travel publications are the ones who face the competitive threat.

Once as an exercise we bought copies of the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, and USA Today. We went through all four papers and looked at every single photograph that they used and asked ourselves, “Is this something that could come from Flickr or not?” We found that probably 75% of the photos in all four papers could have come from Flickr users.

WM: So do professional photographers still occupy territory in the market that might become fair game for amateur competition?

SB: I think there are areas of the market that are safe for professionals. If, say, you’re being interviewed by a magazine, conceivably they could use an amateur’s photo of you, but more likely the magazine wants to commission new works and to maintain certain exclusive rights to those images. So as part of the editorial process, they take their own photographs.

Also, the whole world of commercial photography is basically off-limits to amateurs. That’s not because of differences in skill or equipment. But say Merck or some other company is putting out a brochure, and they need an image of people of various ethnicities in business attire gesturing towards a computer screen. People don’t just take photos like that for fun. It’s a job to set up photos of men in suits shaking hands or professional women exiting buildings talking on cell phones.

On the other hand, if you look at photos from the recent G20 protests, those posted by Flickr users are every bit as good as those being published by Agence France-Press or AP or Reuters’ wire services, just because the volume is so much bigger. If there are 5000 different people covering an event with an average distribution of talent and equipment quality, chances are the top 20 amateur photographers’ work will be just as good as that taken by the three or so Reuters might have posted there.  

WM: In just the last few years, we’ve seen tools like Flickr challenge our notions of intellectual property. Do you think this will ever have implications for the idea of property ownership outside the digital world?

SB: Not off the top of my head. Certainly it won’t be challenging title to land or real property in the common law sense of the term. But I would hope that it provokes good conversations about the kinds of rights that should be available to people and the kinds of rights that they should have by default. For instance, Flickr allows users to choose licenses for their photographs other than “All Rights Reserved.” There are 100 million photos on Flickr that are available under the Creative Commons License, which specifies the rights the photographer is willing to surrender. Of course there are many different kinds of Creative Commons License; some of them only require attribution to the photographer—that’s the most liberal kind. Others prohibit commercial use of the work and don’t allow derivative works to be made. There are a few other conditions you can apply as well.

I understand why there is copyright law and I think it’s a good thing. I think that the current laws in the U.S. are crazy out of whack. 75 years after the death of the creator is far too long, and as most people who are interested in this stuff already know, it’s basically Disney. Disney makes the lawsregarding intellectual property, which is fucked up. It shouldn’t be that way. The damage that it does is that there is this whole part of our culture that is unavailable for our casual perusal, whether you’re interested in the music people listened to in the ‘40s or doing academic research.

There’s such a tangle of rights now—technically if a song is published before 1922 it’s public domain, but it’s very difficult to a sound recording even if it was made prior to that time, because there is such a weird set of laws in place. No one wants to take responsibility for that legal mess because they could end up getting sued.

I hope people begin to see the creative output of civilization as a shared resource or a commons. “Creative Commons” is nicely named in that respect.

WM: You’re somebody who made a big impact on the world at a relatively early age. Today’s enterprising young people face a job market and a business climate that have been transformed by economic crisis. How would you say things are different nowadays for, say, a rising college senior, compared to how they were when you were starting your own career, and what do you think it means for entrepreneurship?

SB: When I started my career—that is, when I decided I wasn’t going to pursue a PhD in ’97-98—that was just after the Asian currency crisis. People don’t really remember now but that was a big deal. People were worried there was going to be a big crash in the United States, which didn’t end up happening. Of course immediately after that came Dot Com mania…

When we started Flickr in 2002, after the Dot Com crash, after Enron and Worldcom, and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, we weren’t necessarily at a lower point in terms of the Dow or the S&P 500, but things were definitely worse in terms of investor confidence facing Internet startups. Even now it’s still easier to raise money for your consumer-based Internet service than it was in 2002.

I don’t think a recession like this really matters to entrepreneurs. It does matter if you want to get a regular job, certainly in finance but also in management consulting and other things like that—it will be much more difficult for you. But for the entrepreneur, there are actually huge advantages to starting a venture outside of a boom. In the boom times, because your competitor can raise $15 million and do all sorts of stupid things with his money, like pay high salaries to the talented engineers you wanted to hire, or throw a lot of money at distribution deals, etc. Suddenly you have fifteen competitors all doing the same thing instead of just one or two.

This is almost received wisdom at this point, but I think bad economic times are the best times to start new companies.

WM: As a final thought, any suggestions for an ambitious recent graduate today?

SB: Don’t work at Merrill Lynch!