Lessig helped found the Creative Commons (CC), a system similar to the open-source GPL license. Whenever we author a creative work – write an essay, take a photo or paint a picture – we own its copyright, even without registering it. Basically this requires anyone who wishes to use our material to ask, and potentially pay, us. A CC license relaxes these restrictions by varying degrees, allowing people to recycle our content in certain situations.
The CC website details the licenses and their nuances here. Flickr breaks it all down in more human language, however:
Attribution
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work – and derivative works based upon it – but only if they give you credit.
Noncommercial
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work – and derivative works based upon it – but for noncommercial purposes only.
No Derivative Works
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.
Share Alike
You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.
The noncommercial licenses cause no shortage of discussion online. For example, if you place a noncommercially licensed photo from Flickr, but have a few Google AdSense ads along the side, does that make your blog a commercial enterprise? What if the blog supporting a business? Unfortunately, no solid answers exist until a body of case law develops.
Until then, here's our non-lawyerly take on things: if the licensed work isn't selling a product, then it is a noncommercial use. Take the Flickr photo and blog example above: all those uses would be noncommercial. But, if you were selling your book on your blog and posted a Flickr photo in the ad, then you would violate the noncommercial clause.
Cautious bloggers can always buy commercially licensed photos from microstock photo agencies, which can charge as little as 14 cents. These image archives often contain lucky shots by amateurs and cutting-room-floor sweepings by professionals, all royalty-free. Some popular options include Dreamstime, Shutterstock, BigStockPhoto, Fotolia and the original agency iStockPhoto.
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1 comments:
I'm using Creative Commons Attribution images on A Dating Confessional. I list credit at the bottom of the post as you suggested (and because the blogger platform sucks with regard to caption alignment). Then I go back to the photographer's site and leave a comment of thanks, including the permalink showing how their photo has been used. So far, they've all stopped in to see their image on the ADC. And sometimes they share the link with their friends and then their friends share the link with...well, you get it.
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