Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
There’s a joke saying that the most common lie in the world is “I have read and understood Terms and Conditions.” Well, misunderstanding terms and conditions could cost a student newspaper team thousands of dollars.
A student media group reportedly used a photo from a popular Creative Commons website to illustrate their article. However, the photographer who took the image claims it was copyright infringement and is suing the newspaper for over $5,000.
The Creative Commons licenses have been a blessing a curse. It’s allowed people to freely publish their images for other people to use while still having some degree of control over how it’s used. It’s also allowed many people to get access to imagery that they might not otherwise be able to afford to use. But it has also led to a few problems.
There are a number of image search websites out there for Creative Commons content now, including Google Images, but now Creative Commons have combined them all into a single searchable database.
Since Flickr got acquired by SmugMug, there have been some significant changes on the platform. One of them is the 1000-image limit for Free accounts, with all the excess photos being deleted. However, Flickr has announced that all Creative Commons images will be protected from the deletion, as well as “In Memoriam” accounts dedicated to deceased members.
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.
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.
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…]
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…
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:
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…]
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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