October 1st, 2007, 8 Comments »
The New York Times has caught wind of a story that first broke in July on Flickr:
One moment, Alison Chang, a 15-year-old student from Dallas, is cheerfully goofing around at a local church-sponsored car wash, posing with a friend for a photo. Weeks later, that photo is posted online and catches the eye of an ad agency in Australia, and Alison appears on a billboard in Adelaide as part of a Virgin Mobile advertising campaign.
At the time, I read about it on Gillian’s blog–one of her photos was used in the ad campaign. As the article points out, the issue isn’t so much about the Creative Commons licensing, but about securing model releases for humans featured in the ads.
Gillian points out that it would’ve been nice if somebody from Virgin had contacted her, just to say “hey, we’re using your photo on bus shelters”. I suspect that most photographers would be flattered to hear that.
Chang and the person who took her photo, Justin Ho-Wee Wong, have filed a lawsuit against Virgin. Rather stupidly, they’ve named Creative Commons in the legal action. They claim that “as the creator of this new license, they have an obligation to define it succinctly.” Er no, there are already laws governing commercial use–I think that’s outside of the ground that CC licensing covers. Lawrence Lessig says as much in the Times article.
8 Comments »
July 17th, 2007, 28 Comments »
Duane emailed with an interesting piece on stolen photos, attribution and the practicalities of Flickr and Creative Commons licensing:
While I usually try to use my own photographs, I have on occasion found suitable Flickr photos taken by others and used those. For anyone who has tried to do that, you will know that many photos nowadays on Flickr have no license associated with them, and instead show “All Rights Reserved”, which obviously means that those photos cannot be used in any capacity.
Is that obvious? There are millions of photos on Flickr that are listed as ‘All Rights Reserved’ but also feature the ‘Blog This’ button. Here’s a randomly selected example. Aren’t those two ideas contradictory?
I wondered about how this applied to my own site, and arrived at this somewhat Machiavellian conclusion. If someone has a ‘Blog This’ button on their photo, that’s tacit permission to use it on my blog. I always link back to the original photo, and try to pick CC photos, but frankly I pick the best photo, regardless of license. I’ve only ever had one complaint, and that’s when I forgot to link back. Maybe I should also include a text reference back in the ever-growing metadata at the end of each post?
Am I just being self-serving, or is that a fair interpretation?
Duane also calls up Mike Linksvayer, Vice President of Creative Commons, and asks him a few questions about usage and attribution. It’s a short interview, and worth listening to.
UPDATE: Ironically, the photo I just added to this post is (by the very talented Thomas Hawk) has a CC license, but no “Blog This” button.
UPDATE #2: I searched around the Flickr forums, and there seems to be a great deal of confusion about the ‘Blog This’ versus ‘All Rights Reserved’ issue. I’m none the wiser, but will endeavour to stick with CC-licensed photos to avoid the issue.
28 Comments »
