NYtimes tech blog: Sonia Zjawinsky actually suggests the use of "Flickr as an Interior Decorating Tool". Though it is hard to believe, this quotation is the title of her article.

She writes: "I sift through Flickr on a regular basis for images to use as visuals for my blog posts" and "And if you’re wondering about copyright issues (after all, these aren’t my photos), the photos are being used by me for my own, private, noncommercial use" and "Of all the artwork I have in my studio apartment (there isn’t a bare wall in the house), my Flickr finds get the most attention. Best of all, they were practically free!"
The only sentence we can agree with is: "Obviously, photographers and others may feel quite differently about this." As an obvious consequence, she had to retract her statements later, publishing this followup blog post.
Here she apologizes to the readers and specifies that she always asks the author for permission. And only then does she give details about the existence of different kinds of permissions and licenses released by authors.
Unfortunately those first statements were so explicit and unequivocal as to be hard to retract later within a logical context. Among other things, in Flickr you find photographers who travel across difficult territories reporting dramatic situations, and considering it "an interior decorating tool" is simply embarrassing.
Personal use at your home doesn't mean it's free. If it was, watching a pirated DVD between the walls of your home would be legal. But it's not. While one could reason that, watching a copied DVD, he's just stealing a handful of coins from a billionare corporation, in the case of Flickr photos, proportions change dramatically.
That attitude penalizes independent workers (Flickr has a large professional user base) that make their own living from every few copy of their photographies.

Flickr and other similar services are great and powerful tools for a photographer and we still believe uploading is a good and productive pratice, even if their images could be (and are) improperly used. I personally know about many news agencies doing this, however I also know about many successful stories made possible only by the sharing services. We ourselves often discover new artists and involve them in the Illumina project. When pondering the pros and cons, we firmly think that sharing photographs and using them the proper way is indispensable these days. Those who become overconcerned may lose too many good occasions.
It is obvious that a photographer must be aware of the risks taken by posting his photos on Flickr or other sharing sites.
Furthermore, they must be aware of copyright law which includes the doctrine of "fair use": according to fair use, copying will not infringe a copyright when it is "for purposes such as criticism, commentary, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research." Newspapers generally use copyrighted materials freely for editorial purposes, depending on fair use. Unfortunately the doctrine is prone to interpretations, and Sonia may have gone too far in her blog, publishing her personal thoughts and opinions.
But what surprises us is that these inappropriate thoughts are being shared with millions of readers through one of the major respectable periodicals, in this case the NY Times, spreading the misleading and personal intepretations, as if the strict copyright laws were simply a thorny issue.