I myself am a big fan of Creative Commons Licensing and use it on my websites and my Flickr photos. But you should read the articles and decide for yourselves.
Broadly speaking CC works well, but with photography, it’s a particularly thorny issue because there’s a lot more complexity in how copyright and other legal issues work with a photo. The problem you tend to run into with CC is that people use it pretty liberally without thinking about the consequences of it. The vast majority of people generating all this media under a CC license don’t really understand all the ramifications of it. A case that recently came up was that somebody took a photo of a kid, and then that photo was picked up by a company that used it for commercial purposes. The child’s parent never signed a release for the photo.Now, this isn’t a problem with CC per se, but people will often license content under CC without realizing that, technically they may not have all the rights to do what they are doing. When I take photos, I put them on Flickr under a CC license but I use the no commercial use clause. This simplifies matters because, given that it’s not for money, there’s far less implications for somebody using my images.Now why is this different from using the default copyright license? Because in that case, the areas that tend to get you into trouble are not permitted by default. If you go to my site and take a copyrighted image and use it commercially, you’ve clearly broken the law. If you go and take my CC licensed image, you’re okay with me, but it doesn’t mean I was okay in the first place. Nobody’s likely to sue you for just showing an image on your Flickr account, but it’s very different when you’re talking about using an image in marketing materials, etc.Slashdot is reporting problems with the Creative Commons License and photographs.
If you have a photography website or put photos on Flickr with CC licensing be sure to check out these articles.1 ) The Creative Commons and Photography2 ) Follow up: Creative Commons and Photography3 ) Gaming the Creative Commons for ProfitMore information:Creative CommonsCopywrite.org
2 responses so far ↓
1 unwesen // Feb 1, 2008 at 7:21 am
Copyright doesn’t really touch on the things you make a picture of, just on the picture itself. In the cited case, the parents have no say in how the picture of their child is used from a copyright perspective, because children aren’t covered by copyright law.
It may be that other laws intended to protect children exist, and the parents would have to explicitly permit or deny the usage of images of their child. However, that’s of no concern to the creative commons license, which deals with copyright exclusively.
It should be self-evident that someone releasing an image under a creative commons license licenses the image only, and not what’s depicted — both to the creator of such images and the users.
But the important issue here is that it’s problematic to make/release pictures e.g. of other people’s kids in general, while the type of license you release the image under is pretty irrelevant.
2 admin // Feb 3, 2008 at 8:55 am
It should be self evident, especially to large corporations but it does not seem to be.
Did you hear last week that Ford was refusing to allow pictures of its cars in a calendar made by owners of older black Fords? Ford eventually backed down after negative publicity.
The confusion seems to go both ways.
Ford Car owners are pirates…
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