Creative Commons Licensing and Photography
Monday, August 20th, 2007
Daryl Lang did an article for Photo District News: Creative Commons is Bad for Photography and wouldn’t you know it, Sean Reiser wrote a rebuttal: Creative Commons is Good for Photography.
If you don’t know what Creative Commons licensing is all about you might want to check out Creative Commons at Wikipedia and the Creative Commons web site.
The world of traditional copyright is changing and Creative Commons is attempting to think things through and provide forward thinking alternatives. However, there is much misunderstanding about what a photographer’s rights are and how we should protect our work from theft when we show it online. On the one hand if no one sees our work, what’s the point? On the other, if we put it online in high enough resolution to show a prospective buyer of a print what it might look like large, we run the risk of people downloading and printing it themselves, no matter what license or copyright we slap on it.
The examples given in both articles are useful and this issue is complex enough that it’s hard to sort it out completely.
One can be very open hearted and generous but the minute one finds someone else taking credit for and selling one’s work, then the issue starts to have a different flavor.
If/when I reach the situation, when income from photography is able to outweight current and past expenses from photography, then I might start giving out my older images on CC basis (non-commercial, no-derivative, attribution).
At the moment my (rights managed type of) stock agency type of sales are not able to keep up with my eagerness to try different things and as a result timeline for that is getting further and further away into future.
It might well be that I never reach that situation, because as far as I can see situation in Finland at least is such that most of the photography related money is done on shooting potraits and/or shooting weddings and other social events. So one would need to get hired to be on site, shooting images vs. taking images for your own fun and occasional sell one or two of those.
Newspapers and other medias are more and more going to the direction, where they ask public to send images to them for free. They might promise movie tickets for lucky ones, attribution or none of these.
Juha: thanks for this and I think you’re handling it in just the right way given your situation.
I’m glad to hear that you are open to giving away some of your older images with a CC license on them because you will benefit from this as well as your images will spread further this way.
I would recommend that you edit the EXIF information and put your name as both the copyright holder and “author” and any other keywords in. Few will see it but at least the image is marked in some way. Yes, scoundrels will edit EXIF and remove it but there’s a limit to how far we should go being paranoid that everyone is out to get us.
Keep up the good work and I hope your photography reaches the point where these issues are critical to you (you start really selling a lot).
Disclaimer: I’m the author of “Creative Commons is Good for Photography”
Surfed here via technorati.
I agree with you, the issue is more complex then I made it in my article. I was certainly taking it from a hobbyiest point of view. Keep in mind that I’m not leagally allowed to see the bulk of my photography (baseball) since I do not have permission from the MLB and quite frankly I’m not that good. I wouldn’t expect a professional photographer to CC shots he plans to sell any more the I expect Microsoft to GPL Office and Windows.
The main reason I wrote the article is that PDN’s article seemed to be filled with FUD. Sorta like “If you use Creative Commons your photos will wind up on billboard herpes ads”. I felt someone needed to say nope… understand CC and know your rights.
Sean: I’m totally with you in both the spirit of your rebuttal but also in that there are different levels of user who take photographs and share them online.
However, that said, it ought not matter whether grandma’s crappy snapshot of the family reunion up on flickr is ripped or a professional photographer’s stuff is ripped. People ought not take things that don’t belong to them and then re-issue them as their own, unless, of course, grandma and the pro put their stuff online as in the public domain (open source, so to speak). But, few people understand what any of that means and a photograph is different from Linux or WordPress.
I agree, the PDN piece needed your gentle but smart kick in the butt and both pieces caught my eye (obviously).
Thanks, keep on holding their feet to the fire.