Creative Commons: Changing the License

A recent Christmas photo. I love the reflections.

Where does this stem from?  In a word?  HubPages.After more research, I’ve opened up the creative commons license granted to my Christmas Project Photos.

I want people to use my photos, but I had a “non-commercial” license on my pictures.

That means that if they were placed on any site that makes money, that the person doing that was at risk of copyright infringement.

How many sites do you know that don’t allow ads?

Yeah, I don’t know very many, either.

Chad Jones [CC-BY-2.0] via Flickr.
This photo has an older CC license (current ones are 3.0), but I do have the rights to use it commercially, as per the license.

When I was younger, I’ll never forget the first time I stood on a diving board for the first time. I was at Valley-Hi swimming pool and in a swim lesson.  All the other kids had already jumped in.

I looked at the pool and I could swear it was going to swallow me up and I’d never see the light of day again.

Plus, the chances were high that I’d do a belly flop on my way in because those things just happen to me.

It was sheer will to set those reservations aside and just jump.

My head came out of the water and all my fears were cast aside.

That’s a little how I feel with this whole Creative Commons business.  Many artists, who first start sharing their photos online and entertain the idea of Creative Commons do the non-commercial thing.

Essentially, though, the only place you can legally share photos are in email messages or similar private ventures.

My goal is to get my stuff out there.  I want people to see my stuff.

But, it’s scary.  I had to make the decision about commercial use.  It’s hard thinking about people making money off my photos – in the sense that they’ll print one off and go to a gallery, call it theirs and sell it.

That’s where I realized Creative Commons comes in.  I retain the copyright to all my work – so, people can use my images on commercial sites, but they can’t make derivative works and they can’t turn around and sell my work saying its theirs.

That just means I can have less of a fear that my head will end up on some nekkid body somewhere.

You can look for photos that can be used “commercially” easily on Flickr.

I think there’s a lot of mis-information about Creative Commons.  Some people say it’s anti-copyright.

It’s not; it works with copyright.

The only bad thing is that most people don’t know the difference between all the licenses.  I didn’t, and even after spending a lot of time researching about it, I still didn’t and it took email exhanges with HubPages to find out more.

What happens is that a lot of people search “images” and assume they can just use them.  However, if you don’t know the license, or unless you know to go to Google and do an advanced search for Creative Commons photos, you might unwittingly share images that you don’t have the right to share.

Creative Commons was invented for the internet because people will share images without giving credit.  I did; that was before I knew that you weren’t supposed to.

I think most people are innocent in that regard: they see an image, like it and want to show it to others.  They have no intention of selling it.  Or, they need an image for a project and just grab a relevant one.

We used to do that with the newspaper: we’d cut out a picture if it was relevant and never really thought about giving credit to the photographer.

Therein lies the irony: if you’re a photographer, you want the credit.

Alas, I finally came to this conclusion: regardless of whether I have “all rights reserved” or “some rights reserved,” honest people will try to do the right thing.  They will honestly try to give credit where credit is due.

Dishonest and ignorant people won’t.  Regardless of what license I’ve applied to my photos.

I may as well not resist that and just run with it.  By putting your images online, you inherently risk your photos being used for whatever purpose.

I just choose not to worry about it.

Now, if someone makes a million dollars off of one of my photos, doesn’t give me credit, and I find out about it, well, you can bet I’d be within my rights to call that person out and even ask for compensation.

It pays to learn about this stuff, for that very reason.

Now, some photos I went back and made “all rights reserved” – basically the ones with watermarks on them.  If and when I replace those photos with a non-watermarked image, I don’t want to imply that my watermark is Creative Commons, too.

I found that out: you can “creative commons” watermarks, too, but it might end up somewhere you might not necessarily be happy with.  So, when I get the chance and go back to replace hundreds of photos with my watermark, well, for now, those will remain with “all rights reserved.”

People will still steal some of those without my permission.  I get that.  If I find out, though, I now know my rights a lot better.

I will explicitly say which photos are Creative Commons and which are not. All of my Christmas Photo Project photos are.

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