Creative Commons and The Blogger

You just wrote the latest, greatest blog post. It is a tremendous read, almost guaranteed to get you recognized and your company new business. If only someone would read it. What you need is visuals to make it “pop” and to add that extra element to your narrative. You have a digital camera but you aren’t a photographer. Plus, you don’t have the time to go hunt from the perfect shot. If you’re like most of us, you search Google Images until you find an image that matches your theme, download it and promptly insert it into your blog. End of story, right? Wrong.

You just committed a crime. No, I don’t think the cops are going to break down your organizations door and confiscate your computers. In fact, most people won’t notice (or care). But being a socially conscious business person (you are, right?!) you need a solution that lets you use digital works legally and fairly. But without getting permission to use that picture you are violating the copyrights assigned to it’s author. A faceless crime, yes, but imagine if someone logged onto your website and used your brand-new communications handbook without your permission? A digital asset is a digital asset, no matter how you cut it.

Not having a licensing budget does not mean you have to cut out visuals from your blogs, articles and posts. It does mean that you will have to be smart about what you attach to your works and find the right tools that will enable fair use. Enter Creative Commons, a great asset for the writer, artist and organization.

Creative Commons “provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.” As you can see, this is one path that you can take to use images properly and responsibility. Creative Common lets the author of an image, for example, dictate how s/he wants the image to be used. There are several classifications available to the artist, the main being Attribution, Non-Commerical,No Derivative Works, and Share Alike. Within each of these classifications there are sub categories, to further refine the rights an author can attach to his or her works. An explanation of each:

Attribution. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request. Example: Jane publishes her photograph with an Attribution license, because she wants the world to use her pictures provided they give her credit. Bob finds her photograph online and wants to display it on the front page of his website. Bob puts Jane’s picture on his site, and clearly indicates Jane’s authorship.

Noncommercial. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only. Examples: Gus publishes his photograph on his website with a Noncommercial license. Camille prints Gus’ photograph. Camille is not allowed to sell the print photograph without Gus’s permission.

No Derivative Works. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it. Example: Sara licenses a recording of her song with a No Derivative Works license. Joe would like to cut Sara’s track and mix it with his own to produce an entirely new song. Joe cannot do this without Sara’s permission (unless his song amounts to fair use).

Share Alike. You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work. Note: A license cannot feature both the Share Alike and No Derivative Works options. The Share Alike requirement applies only to derivative works.

Creative Commons has thought through the process of sharing and has accounted for the widest variety of usage. Depending on how you will be using those pictures for your blog, for example, will dictate which type of licenced media you should seek out. That leads to the next question: how do you find work with creative common licences attached to them?

The first place would be at Creative Common’s own website, where it lists a Content Directories which serves as a portal to sites across the web that attach Creative Commons licences to their work. Coming in a close second is the amazing integration Creative Commons shares with Flickr, the popular image hosting site. Flickr lets you search it exhaustive catalog of pictures and sort them by various creative common licences. In the Non-Attribution category, for example, Flickr has 10,097,703 images available for download and use.

While Creative Commons has certain flaws, and isn’t the end of the story with regards to copyright and author protection, I believe it is the first step to allowing the artists to connect with producers to create a strengthen what is already a symbiotic relationship. Writers and organizations need images/audio/video, and artists need venues to display their art.

What about quality? Like anything else, you’ll have to do a bit of searching. But as the picture attached to this blog attests, there are gems out there to be had, and it’s up to your resourcefulness to find them.

Other solutions include searching in the public domain, or direct artist contract, but I’ve found Creative Commons to be the best solution for our needs, and might be for yours as well. And won’t it be nice to publish that blog without the worry of a late night email threatening litagation from some far off artist for using his or her image without their permission? Not only does the law demand it, but some does your conscious.