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Starting today, 500px no longer have a Creative Commons license option

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Remember that a month ago image sharing platform 500px announced that they will shut their marketplace down? A closer look at the announcement by Redditor Ricky_Lee_Hasselhoff reveals that 500px are also killing their Creative Commons licensing option.

If you are unfamiliar with Creative Commons, you can read about it here, but in a nutshell, it’s a licensing scheme that allows others to use your photos without monetary compensation. Here is the nice thing about creative commons: it allows putting restrictions on usage. Things like an obligation to credit the artist or restricting from commercial use. Basically Creative Commons is a licensing platform that encourages sharing.

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I’m Giving my images for free

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I’m a professional full-time photographer and I choose to let people download and use 95% of my images (even commercially), here’s why.

Who am I ?

I’m Samuel Zeller, a freelance Photographer from Geneva, Switzerland. I’m also an ambassador for Fujifilm and the editor of Fujifeed.

I recently launched my “Archive” a repository which contains nearly all my photography, organized by location and subjects. All of the images can be downloaded for free in high resolution (up to 6000px on the longest side).

Oh and they’re all under a Creative Commons license.

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CC’s “No Rights Reserved” Mark Looks Dangerously Similar To Behance’s “All Rights Reserved” Mark

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Jim Wehtje discovered an apparent oversight that could potentially cause a lot of headaches for photographers and creators in general). It appears the symbol Adobe’s Behance website uses to mark a specific work’s copyright as “No use is allowed without explicit permission from owner” is the exact same mark the Creative Commons uses to label a work as “No rights reserved“, which puts into the public domain. Obviously two very different licenses. Yikes![Read More…]

Photographer Loses Copyright Suit Against Mapmaker Because of Licensing Technicality

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Creative commons licensing is great, especially for online content creators.   It can also be a tremendous tool for gaining recognition through use of your work as you are just starting out in the creative world.  However, it can be a double-edged sword for the unsuspecting.

A few days ago, a court in Washington, DC found in favor of a defendant after they were sued by a photographer for allegedly using his work without permission or compensation.  Why did the photographer seemingly get shafted in this deal?  Because of Creative Commons…

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NASA High-Res Photos Organized Into A Huge Creative NASA Pack (First Of A Series)

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If you are like me and just LOVE space images this is going to be some very sweet news. Creative Reid Southen  went through the tedious job of organizing the many photos NASA releases into a creative Pack.

This is a huge pack consisting of 2,400 high-res photos from the Expeditions 30-42 to the International Space Station. They are mostly sourced from Flickr.

Those 8 expeditions provide plenty of eye opening images that NASA distributes under the Creative Common License (and they are usually marked CC-by, which means that you can use the photo however you would like as long as you attribute them back to NASA, or or CC-by-nc which means that you can use it but not make money out of it ).

Reid makes no claims on originality and has simply organized the photos into a usable pack, which is totally OK under the CC-by license. He also included an attribution folder which will help you to verify that you are using the image correctly without infringing on NASAs copyrights:

Being Creative Commons though, the licenses will vary, so it’ll be up to you to abide by them. I’d include a text file for each photo with the link to the source to make attribution and getting license details easy

The package is ordered by topics:

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Flickr Issues Apology, Removes Creative Commons Photos From Marketplace; But Is It Too Little Too Late?

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In an announcement made today on Flickr, their Vice President Bernardo Hernandez, has issued an official apology letter to it’s users after launching their Wall Art Marketplace program which allowed other Flickr users to purchase prints of photos in the Creative Commons photo pool, with all proceeds going to Flickr. Though Flickr was not actually doing anything illegal, many photographers were caught off guard by the move and most found it to be morally appalling. Hernandez’s letter starts out:[Read More…]

US Copyright Office: Photos Taken by Animals Have No Copyright. Nor Do Photos Taken by God.

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Two weeks ago, the story of the selfie-taking monkey gave me what I had thought was the best article title I was ever going to get to right. I was wrong. This is the best article title that I’ve ever gotten to write.

For those who missed it, around the beginning of this month Wikipedia was caught in a bit of controversy for its ruling on photographs taken by a monkey with photographer David Slater’s camera, saying that Slater had no copyright to them since he wasn’t their photographer. In a update to the story equally as bizarre as the story itself, the US Copyright Office released a 1,222-page document establishing new policies and reaffirming existent stances set on copyright law; touching on the subject at hand, the Office basically said that a picture taken by a monkey is unclaimed intellectual property.

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The Ins and Outs of Using On-Line Photos

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A few months ago, a friend of mine was scrolling through a photography website when he saw something that made him jump out of his chair. There on the screen was a photo of his 6-year-old daughter– sitting on the grass under a stunning summer sky in her beautiful pink dress, having a tea party with her stuffed animals and three kittens. There were several problems with the photo. As I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, my friend had not taken or posted this particular photo of his daughter. In his original photo, the sky was overcast, the dress was yellow, and his daughter– who is actually dangerously allergic to cats– was enjoying a quiet moment alone. More importantly, however, the person who created this composite had never asked for permission to use the original. Needless to say, my friend was more than a little pissed off and immediately set to the task of tracking down the photographer and “politely asking” that the image be taken down immediately. It took a while, but the photographer eventually complied.

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Wikimedia: Because the Monkey Pressed the Shutter, It Owns the Picture

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The two pictures above were taken by British nature photographer David Slater in 2011, when a black macaque walked over to him and hijacked his camera, proceeding to take numerous amounts of selfies. With the pictures going viral, they found themselves on Wikimedia’s Commons page, where they’ve been available as public domain. The problem? When David Slater requested the pictures be taken down, Wikimedia refused – the reason being that because it was the animal pressing the shutter, the photo didn’t actually belong to him.

It’s safe to say that Wikimedia might be going a bit bananas (I’m sorry.) here, because what they’re basically saying is that since the monkey took the picture, it owns the copyright.

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Can I Use That Picture? This Flowchart Helps You Demystify Copyright Law

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UPDATE: the chart was wrong in in more than one way, we took it down. You can still see the original link in the article, but I do not suggest following its advice, you can read more about it here.

There is a lot of confusion surrounding copyright law and when it’s okay or not okay to use photographs that are not your own. Fortunately, Curtis Newbold, AKA The Visual Communications Guy, created this handy flowchart to help you assess when, why, and where you can use certain photographs. If you find yourself frequently questioning the legality (or morality) of resharing an awesome photo you came across on the internet, you may want to bookmark the chart for quick access.

The flowchart  (click here for a big version) makes it easy to understand the differences between Copyright, Fair Use, Creative Commons, and Public Domain–four topics which are often the source of great confusion.  On the flipside of things, the chart may also be useful to photographers who wonder about their own photographs and the purposed in which others may redistribute them.

[ The Visual Communications Guy via PetaPixel, lifehacker]

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