I ran into the issue that some TV show in the UK wanted to use a picture I have on flickr that's marked CC-BY 2.0 (not SA). In other words attribution required but not share alike.
Anyway, for me one point of sharing CC-BY is to just let people use the image without asking. Of course lawyers got involved and the TV station contacted me and said I needed to sign some contract so they could use my image for free ?!???!!
Sorry, I'm not going to sign some contract that I should have a lawyer look at $$$ and that also puts me on the line for any legal issues in the photo that comes up later especially when you aren't paying me. They moved on. Which is fine by me but sad in general that they didn't just take the license as is
I had a similar incident with, strangely enough, Microsoft. It wanted to use one of my photographs in promotional material and asked permission. I said that permission had already been given by me in the form of a CC-BY and they were very welcome to use it. It took quite a bit of to-ing and fro-ing before I got annoyed and said that if its legal counsel didn't understand licenses of all things, then they probably should be fired.
For things like promotional material, large companies will attempt to get explicit, signed permission instead of relying on something simply thrown up there on the web.
They understood the licensing just fine, they also understand covering their ass explicitly. They don't feel like being left to your whims should you choose to change license to attempt to extort money out of them after they start a large campaign.
> They don't feel like being left to your whims should you choose to change license to attempt to extort money out of them after they start a large campaign.
I'm not a lawyer but this is wrong, if you've released material under a license in most legal jurisdictions that's binding, releasing it under a different license does not invalidate the terms of the previous one.
A random website claiming "this is my stuff and under CC license" is less reliable than a written contract.
How do you prove that the license really was granted if I take the website down? Convince a court that archive.org or a printed screenshot is evidence? If I falsely claimed to own the rights to the images, and you get sued by the true owner, can you show you acted in good faith and did enough to verify the license? If you have a contract with me and I lied, you probably would have better chances of recovering your damages from me.
It would be interesting to see how many companies would pay a small fee for this if you asked.
> relying on something simply thrown up there on the web ... They don't feel like being left to your whims should you choose to change license
Fair enough. Naive question... Does the Wikimedia Commons (and other established sites) not address this? Licensees of CC material will find content and license change histories, archiving, and (thus) audibility if a dispute arises. i.e. claims like "this was the license on date X" become verifiable
Doesn't need to be in the CC license. If they ask, you can just offer them an alternative license that costs them, but gets them a signed piece of paper. Putting "requests for clarification mean you have to pay" in a license sounds like a bad idea.
I doubt that. The picture was a pretty generic picture of a statue in the Louvre which I'm sure they searched for free images for. Also, I didn't want to later be sued by the Lourve if it turns out they needed extra rights (which is the contract they effectively wanted me to sign)
If all they wanted was a signed copy of the CC-BY license I would have signed it
As others have said some organizations simply just want to pay you because it's easier for them legally.
I and a friend of mine took a high-res photo of an insect and I uploaded it to my flickr account under a CC-BY-SA license.
I got contacted by some publisher of a textbook from the UK and the conversation went like this:
them> We'd like to pay you for your photo
me> no worries man, you don't need to, it's freely licensed, just
use it and credit us.
them> Uh, this really would just be easier if we give you money.
me> Ok, if you insist.
They ended up giving us a few beer cases worth of money for something they could have gotten for free, because their corporate processes presumably didn't jive with getting freely licensed work from some website.
I can see the other side of it though - (roughly speaking) money changes hands -> definitely a contract, non-monetary licence -> probably a contract. IF they don't use CC-BY-SA images often, it might be cheaper/less risky to just offer a token payment rather than getting their legal team to check the CC licence.
Yes it makes perfect sense, not saying it doesn't. Just sharing my experience as a counterpoint to the other people in this thread who are surprised that anyone might ever pay for freely licensed content.
I really dislike how the media will gladly take and use people's work without credit and yet at the same time they pursue copyright infringement of their cherished 70+ year old works like hounds at the track.
Disney doing this is a net good, as it funds more projects. There are plenty of public domain animated shorts and characters, but once out of copyright no one seems to have any desire or incentive to protect or make new works from them as opposed to bundle bad copies of them on dollar dvds.
Disney has lobbied (and succeeded) to have the copyright length extended every time Mickey Mouse is coming up to it's copyright limit. Is it a net good when a multibillion dollar corporation manipulates IP laws to further its own interests? We've had our laws manipulated to protect a cartoon mouse. Copyright was meant to be a short term guarantee that creators could profit from their art, not an eternal claim of ownership.
I don't know about the first part (and frankly I don't care) but my idea of the second part is the same length as a patent: 20 years. 20 years after publication all works irrevocably enter the public domain and are free for everyone to use for all purposes. 20 years after death unpublished works also enter the public domain or are ineligible for copyright. And the law that sets this would state that all existing works now have just 20 years copyright.
Open source license regimes are of dubious value unless there's visible case law backing it up. It's great that Niccolo Caranti made the effort to defend the Creative Commons license--this is a lot of effort regardless of whether you recover legal costs.
(Personally I'll make double sure to attribute images from Wikipedia from here on out.)
Assuming the denial is actually enforced, which it normally is not. And generally speaking the only enforcement mechanism is for somebody with standing to bring a lawsuit.
GPL V2 licenses are violated on a constant basis in my personal experience. (I used to run a business that competed in the MySQL market.) It is relatively difficult to detect inclusion of GPL code in shipped binaries, for example, especially if the audience of users is not large or the binaries are part of a larger system.
There are some cases where infringement was recognized but damages were $0 because that was the amount the creator would have earned for a licensed use. Unless I'm remembering incorrectly.
Citation needed, that's patently absurd. Unless the damages were $0 PLUS following the terms of the license (adding a statement of credit for BSD, offering a download of the modified source for GPL etc)
In general, the remedy for violating a license is to follow through on the license agreement.
I recently took video of an elevator fire in North Dakota[1] and posted it on twitter. I was surprised by the number of messages I got asking if various news folks could use the video.
Given this experience, I'm really surprised that this isn't more a of a problem as media really seems to be going into the weeds to find video / pictures of things. I also thought Twitter had some kind of statement in their TOS about this. I wonder what the interaction between externally hosted things with their licenses versus Twitter's TOS.
1) It was on my way home from work and I was parked for a bit
You bet it's a problem, and it is a somewhat new trend on Twitter. Someone blazed the trail and now every harried producer has a read-only Twitter account and mimics it; it's a last-couple-of-years phenomenon. I appreciate nothing more than coming across a grieving Twitter page showing photos of horrors with a billion entry level producers underneath it clamoring for usage rights like feeding sharks. This happened to you, it sounds like, and luckily you were removed enough from the story that it was no big deal.
You might react and go "that's horrible, why would they do that?" but remember when Cathriona White died, and every 'news' organization in the world immediately (and I mean immediately) started calling her family demanding an interview simply on the basis of her relationship with Jim Carrey? I seem to recall someone in her family saying that they heard about her death from a reporter calling and asking for comment from a seven year old. He was pissed about it and good for him, really, and I say that as someone who used to be in a slightly more respectable part of that bloody industry.
Twenty four hour news and, later, the Internet did this to us (well, really, we did and these were merely tools to satiate human nature). There is zero regard for "the right time" when interacting with subjects of stories any more by most producers. The right time is now because our readers demand fast content and fuck your feelings.
The irony is that Twitter is probably the one platform that is tirelessly working to make a traditional journalist go back to being traditional by eliminating the urgency of reporting and shifting focus back to analysis and context. So it's weird to watch producers work Twitter to basically digest a primary source and be late by definition. Twitter is way better at telling me what's going on now. I want analysis and context from journalists now, but most haven't picked up on that yet. (This is also why Twitter will not eliminate the media, despite what some people say; half of journalism is placing events in context. Some might say half is a conservative estimate.)
And that's even before you get into the viral video agencies who snap up rights from people who don't know any better, and I can't decide which is worse. Seriously, what a way to make money; what service do you provide, exactly?
It's interesting how this keep happening when it is so easy to do it right. In my case someone commented on my flickr that a startup was using one of my photos without attribution, but it only took one email and the CEO/founder immediately responded apologizing. Other times I've got emails asking me if it was OK to use a photo, as if they had to seek permission.
I wonder if the problem is the need for more education/outreach to explain CC?
Case law on CC is very minimal so far [0], so this hasn't been explored in court.
ShareAlike is intentionally copyleft, yes. But it isn't clear what would constitute the 'derivative work'. If you had a glimpse of the photo in the movie with a 'Ken Burns' effect, would releasing a CC 2 sec video of that effect applied to the image be okay? Probably. But who knows if anyone would succeed in suing you to either CC the whole film, or pay for another form of license.
Is an article containing an image, used in its original form derivative? Probably not, the Wikipedia citation creator explicitly gives you this option: if you don't modify the image, only use it, then it doesn't prompt you to fill out the derivative information. Obviously that's not in any way legally binding, but gives an indication of how things tend to be used.
There's plenty of case law regarding derivative works; it's not CC specific, but why would it have to be? Either the license is valid or it's a straight-up copyright infringement.
You may have a much better knowledge than I (wouldn't be hard). But that example doesn't quite answer the question. If a work is derivative, what is the extent of the derivative work, for the purpose of copyleft? Can you answer that without specific case law on copyleft licenses?
I've worked in OER for 5+ years. What I've been told (unofficially) by people from Creative Commons and other experts is that when using a BY-SA image in a website or text document, the license does not "bubble up" and force the website or document be BY-SA.
From my understanding, the argument is that the website or document is considered a medium for distributing the image, but is not an adaptation or derivative work of the image. If the image itself was modified, that modification would have to be BY-SA.
Copyleft means that the derivative work should have been published under a compatible license (providing at least the same freedoms - in practice often the same license). The act of publishing does not automatically place the derivative work under the same or a compatible license; it means that the derivative work violates copyright and that the its author is liable for damages (unless fair use applies).
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and I am not liable for anyone taking above as legal advice.
If you actually wanted people to use your work freely, you'd release it into the public domain.
This incident shows that CC evangelists can be just as controlling and litigious as the conventional copyright holders they inveigh against. So much for making the world more equitable and accessible.
I understand the spirit of your comment, but now seems like a good time to quote this page that someone posted to HN a couple of months ago:
"Just as there is nothing in the law that permits a person to dump personal property in the public highway, there is nothing that permits the dumping of intellectual property into the public domain — except as happens in due course when any applicable copyrights expire. Until those copyrights expire, there is no mechanism in the law by which an owner of software can simply elect to place it in the public domain."
That's both perhaps true in a hypertechnical sense but largely false in practical substance in the US; there are a number of legal principles (notably promissory estoppel) which make the practical effect of a stated dedication to the public domain by the creator very similar to what it says on the tin, even if the creator technically retains copyright, as it becomes practically, if not technically, impossible to enforce any of the exclusive rights under copyright to restrict downstream actions like copying or creation and distribution of derivative works after such a dedication.
> If you actually wanted people to use your work freely, you'd release it into the public domain.
The photographer explicitly didn't want it to be used freely. He wanted it be used for free only by people who gave him credit for his work, which is why he used a license that said so. Per the article: “I’m happy to see my photos spread around, but I demand proper attribution. It’s not much for a free photo.”
> This incident shows that CC evangelists can be just as controlling and litigious as the conventional copyright holders they inveigh against. So much for making the world more equitable and accessible.
Why are you railing against people who fight for CC licenses? Surely it is better than conventional copyright holders, who charge you for any use of their work? Are you against copyright law as a whole, and believe everything should be in the public domain?
A+ for entertainingly cranky tone, but D+ on content for apparently not understanding their strategy.
Creating and maintaining any commons requires rules and work. CC evangelists do want people to use their work, but they also want to create a situation where lots of people use lots of other people's work, which means getting creators to be comfortable offering their creations. CC does a great job of capturing and expressing the common concerns of creators, which makes more work available. But that only works in the long run if those concerns are truly honored.
So I don't think they're being hypocrites at all. You may prefer to release your stuff into the public domain. (Funnily, you don't link your PD-shared works in your profile, so you must not want people to use your work freely either.) But others prefer differently. Looking at Flickr, it looks like the CC-licensed collection is about 100x larger than the PD-licensed collection:
> Looking at Flickr, it looks like the CC-licensed collection is about 100x larger than the PD-licensed collection
That's likely because CC-licensing has been available on Flickr since 2008 [0] and they only recently started offering the Public Domain license as an option in 2015 [1].
It's good to see them finally offer more license types but they are so late to the game that many people like me just self-published or posted to Wikimedia Commons under the PD license instead, for all those years. I'm sure my images get fewer views than they would on Flickr but I can't be bothered to switch now.
Excellent point; I had missed that. The 100x number isn't indicative of a free choice. On the other hand, that they took 7 years to add the feature still gives some sense of the relative demand.
The issue here was with attribution, which the license explicitly requires. Public domain doesn't require that so it wouldn't have come into play here. The reason they had to be "controlling and litigious" is so that their licensing terms were respected and they received the attribution they deserved. This is no different than the Free Software Foundation going after GPL violators; while the overall goal of the GPL license is to permit others to modify and distribute the software, it also requires sharing modifications made. When you use someone's image without respecting their license, it damages the purpose of the license and would only discourage free licensing.
> The reason they had to be "controlling and litigious" is so that their licensing terms were respected and they received the attribution they deserved
You are free to harass people about licensing if you want, but you don't then get to turn around and claim you're fighting the good fight against overly restrictive copyright law.
If you're litigating against small-time festival organizers for not putting fine print on a poster picture, you're much closer to the Warner Music end of the spectrum rather than the Richard Stallman end of the spectrum in terms of copyright.
You claim that enforcing open licenses, designed to make it easier to use, modify and share works for general benefit is more big-bad business than Stallmans perspective. But Stallman is generally a vocal supporter of such licenses, so if he supports their enforcement he is just as bad?
Both CC and open-source software use the framework of existing copyright law to guarantee a "fair" use of works, with only few restrictions. Not without any restrictions.
I maybe should not have responded with this provocative question, but to me both movements use very similar tools for similar purposes.
> Both CC and open-source software use the framework of existing copyright law to guarantee a "fair" use of works, with only few restrictions. Not without any restrictions.
You said it much better than I ever could :). And that's why I used the comparison to the GPL, especially since that has a history of the FSF going to court over violations.
Anyway, for me one point of sharing CC-BY is to just let people use the image without asking. Of course lawyers got involved and the TV station contacted me and said I needed to sign some contract so they could use my image for free ?!???!!
Sorry, I'm not going to sign some contract that I should have a lawyer look at $$$ and that also puts me on the line for any legal issues in the photo that comes up later especially when you aren't paying me. They moved on. Which is fine by me but sad in general that they didn't just take the license as is