Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007
Don’t be afraid of Creative Commons
Suw wrote about the case last week when Virgin Mobile Australia used a Creative Commons licenced photo in an ad campaign. She called it an abuse of goodwill. Now Robin Hamman has warned people to think twice about re-using Creative Commons licenced photos. Virgin Mobile Australia kept to the letter of the law in terms of the Attribution Creative Commons licence, but, as Suw said, they are guilty of “flagrantly abusing its spirit”.
I’m a huge advocate of Creative Commons licenced content, and I’m trying to increase the use of CC audio, video and images at the Guardian. At the moment, Guardian management has taken a cautious approach, worrying that even if people have licenced their works allowing commercial use that people might think twice if a media company uses their images, audio or video. I wasn’t involved in those discussions, although I would have liked to make a more pro-CC argument. (Part of me wonders if there were union considerations as well. But as I said, I wasn’t privy to the discussion so that’s only speculation.)
But I’ll provide a couple of quick examples of how acting with goodwill and keeping both to the letter and spirit of the law can be a way to increase engagement with your community and broader, more distributed online communities, even if you are a commercial media company. On the Guardian’s Food Blog Word of Mouth, editor Susan Smillie set up a Flickr group and encourages blog fans to share their photos. Anna Pickard used a picture from Flickr on a post about sweets that people bring back from their holidays abroad.
I used a picture from Flickr to illustrate Republicans hatred of Hillary Clinton on our new US-focussed blog, Deadline USA. I take care to link back to the original photo, credit the user and link to their profile and make sure that it is clear that this is CC-licenced content, not content under Guardian copyright. If I have contact information, I let the photographer know that I used the picture. This morning, I got a nice message from the Flickr user who created the illustration, azrainman. He thanked me for making the extra effort, and even gave me a little link love.
This is what blogging and social media is about, knowing the social norms and taking part in this global conversation as an equal even if you do work for a big media company. If you’re looking to boot-strap your community on your site, it’s always good to plug in and play (nice) with established digital communities.
Technorati Tags: journalism, media 2.0, Creative Commons, web2.0
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October 3rd, 2007 at 12:20 pm
BBC music online recently put Creative Commons licences on all their album reviews. Here’s an example of one I wrote:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/release/5q9x/
(although I doubt if anyone will want to link to it!)
October 4th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
There’s another side to this.
My father, who’s a pretty good photographer, decided to ‘try this CC thing out’ and licensed all of his photos on Flickr as “Creative Commons With Attribution”…
… yeah, he didn’t know the importance of including the “non-commercial” facet of the license.
He only realized this when it came to light his pictures have been used by a number of blatently commercial travel sites and apparently even re-printed in a book.
I think he was pretty angry, especially when I explained that the license he had chosen allowed them to do this. I managed to convice him to swap to CC-NC rather than back to (c), but of course that’s not retrospective.
There’s also some legal views that one a photo is licensed CC that license perpetuates for **future use** even if the owner of the work switches back to a more restrictive license.
October 5th, 2007 at 2:49 am
I’d say donating artworks to the Creative Commons is more about gaining karma, and has little do with egomania and selfish pursuits.
When you stand above monetization and expect nothing in return, then it’s all windfall when it does happen.
Chopra was right…
October 13th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
In a strange sense, this may be a good thing to educate more people about Creative Commons licenses and their proper useages. I have used lots of CC photos on my blog entries. I have a blog call “Dragonfly on the Wall” and I love using pix of Dragonflies on it. And I’ve also put most of my Flickr photos under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license for others to use. But sometimes I do put full copyright or Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licenses if they are personal photos that I would hate to see misused. Just my 2 cents.
Here is a link to a blog entry of Prof. Lessig’s (founder of CC) take on the legal challenge
http://lessig.org/blog/2007/09/on_the_texas_suit_against_virg.html