Should I put my photo collection on a Creative Commons license?

April 19, 2008 5:07 AM

As a hobby photographer, I'm playing with the idea of putting my large industrial decay photo collection on a CC license. Should I?

I'm a hobby photographer specializing in urban exploration and decay photography. I have a rather big photo collection online (850+ images). I'm hardly making any money of photography - if I occasionally do, it's on high-quality prints via exhibitions, which is nice, but necessary for my survival.

I like the idea of people being able to use my art for non-commercial purposes and have familiarized myself with the diffent kinds of Creative Commons licenses.

What do you think - should I put my collection on a CC license? If yes, which type?

posted by lord_yo to media & arts (8 comments total)

"/not/ necessary for my survival", I suppose you meant.

It doesn't really matter. It's up to you. What permissions do you want to give people?

I use "by-sa" a lot, but not "nc". As a result, I've been published a few times -- the most recently in a how-to book published by O'Reilly & Assoc., which I received a free copy of this week. It's fun, I think.
posted by cmiller at 6:09 AM on April 19, 2008

I'm all for it. I'm an educator and I always try to push kids to use CC work especially since many projects that kids create end up being published on the web. It eases so many questions of use. One thing that I think it is important to understand is that whether or not you use a CC license or traditionally copyright a work, there is always going to be potential for abuse. Many CC critics say that CC leads to abuse which is not true. People will abuse other people's work whether it is CC licensed or not. Would you use Flickr or another service?

I've done presentations on Creative Commons and CC Resources. If you are interested in reading up some more (including criticisms) see http://copyleft.crios.info/ .

As for a license that you should use, bare minimum should be Attribution-Noncommercial, that way you can still get paid if somebody is going to commercially use your work. You could tack on either No Derivatives or Share Alike (but not both, the two don't go together) depending on if you want the original look of your work respected or if you want to continue to spread the CC meme.

Good luck. I hope you're successful in whatever you choose. Could you PM if you decide to CC your collection? I'd love to see your work and possibly add it as another image resource to draw from.
posted by crios at 6:30 AM on April 19, 2008

"Many CC critics say that CC leads to abuse which is not true."

Considering this is an on-going debate not only in the open-source community but also in the field of intellectual property law, it's fantastic that you found such an unequivocal solution!

Seriously, though, there's a lot of validity to the suggestions that CC can, in some situations, cause more confusion/abuse than it helps to solve, and the question is so far from settled for the above comment to be laughable.

That said... you're not making money from the photos now, you'd like for them to be used more, and you're willing to give up some of your exclusive rights to make that happen. The question is why wouldn't you use CC?

Also, something that so few people consider when they make their CC decision: are you willing to actually enforce your copyright? If not, then you're actually (in practice) licensing them under CC, except that the only people who are going to take advantage of it are those with no respect for your rights. The people who follow the rules won't get the benefits... which seems kinda backwards, but that's what happens.
posted by toomuchpete at 7:26 AM on April 19, 2008

Okay, that was pretty presumptuous of me but "there's a lot of validity to the suggestions that CC can, in some situations, cause more confusion/abuse than it helps to solve?" Copyright in general causes a lot of confusion/abuse. IMHO CC clears up A LOT of confusion. Could you you PM me some reading on this? I'd like to see some of the arguments for this.

When I present to students they get CC pretty fast (as long as I follow the rules laid down by the creator, I'm good to go). When I start talking about copyright, that's when they get confused because we have to start talking about fair use and what that is and when they can or can't use it (there eyes slowly glaze over) and then there's Section 110 which gives us some breathing room but doesn't necessarily apply to stuff published on the web. In some cases teachers can be the worst abusers and they don't even know they are doing anything wrong. With CC I can just point them towards the resources and say "play by the rules (licenses) and your fine.
posted by crios at 11:59 AM on April 19, 2008

I used to run a little indie record label, and that experience really hammered home the cost of selling your art. If you want to make money from art, you need to treat it as a business, which means marketing and promotion, sales and billing, and usually additional paperwork. Since you've made some money from you photos, you already have some experience with this. If you wanted to make photography more of a revenue source, how much more time would you want to put in to those business activities?

If you prefer not to spend more time on the business side, I'd argue in favor of CC. You get the pleasure of more people seeing your work and often the pleasure of seeing how they reuse it, if you permit that (Wil Wheaton's blogged about how cool it's been to see stuff people have done with his photos). It can also work as promotion, bringing your unique perspective to the attention of folks who might want to pay for commission work.

It can feel really good to give people more freedom to share and reuse what you've created - and if you're not planning to put a lot of effort into the business side, you're probably not giving up much potential revenue.
posted by kristi at 1:08 PM on April 19, 2008

Thanks for all your answers! This is really helpful!

By the way: Does a CC license apply to only the published filesize of a picture? Can I license different resolutions of the same shot in different ways?
posted by lord_yo at 1:15 AM on April 20, 2008

You can license any way you want, I think. (IANAL.) But, Creative-Commons licenses don't cover resizing (except as perhaps no-derivitives(?)), so you can't easily cram your round peg into a square C-C box, which is not necessarily bad. Make up your own license, if you want.

Also, take note of the new extra-info flag on the C-C web site. You can add information (and additional restrictions, maybe) to a C-C license you use. You won't find that noted on the Flickr one-size-fits-all icon set, though.

http://creativecommons.org/license/
"Click to include more information about your work." "More permissions URL"
posted by cmiller at 5:37 AM on April 20, 2008

I've decided to go with a CC by-sa license. For those interested, find the links on my profile page. Thanks for all your help!
posted by lord_yo at 5:09 AM on April 23, 2008