Creative Commons

Work I've been doing at Leeds Art College regarding licensing of images online

Hi Jo,
I've attached a draft web based task for the students. For this task I
decided against looking at specific websites, I'll do that briefly on
Thursday and again when I come back after Easter. I will send you a
list of sites I think they should be looking at but I don't want them
getting hung up on designing or analysing sites.

Instead I want them to research Creative Commons licensing as an
alternative way of copyrighting and distributing work online.
Basically Creative Commons lets you share your work under licenses
that ask for an attribution or a web link rather than payment, and
restricts whether people can alter or change your work. This has
particular relevance to students who are uploading work to Flickr,
DeviantArt etc
Links about it here
http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/comics1
http://www.creativecommons.org.uk/index.php
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/10/digging_deepercreative_commons.html
http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

For the task I want them to research Creative Commons licensing and
how it is being used by photographers as a promotional and
distribution tool.
Then decide how they are going to licence their images they have
created for this brief.

It sounds a bit dull but it's not and it's something they should all
be thinking about if they are putting work online. It raises questions
about ownership of work, traditional distribution versus new
distribution methods, how you market and promote yourself, who uses
your work and what they use it for, how much control you have over
your work, your attitude to other people using your work and so on.

There is also some discussion about what effect Creative Commons
licensing has on traditional stock photo agencies such as Getty
images. There's an article about that here
http://blog.auinteractive.com/its-the-end-of-stock-photography-as-we-know-it-and-i-feel-fine

It would also be interesting to here your opinion on this approach to
copyright and ownership.

The best place to start for background info about Creative Commons
licenses are these links
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/10/digging_deepercreative_commons.html
http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/comics1
http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

These are examples of sites that search for Creative Commons licensed
images, so you can see how this type of licensing of images works
http://www.zoo-m.com/flickr-storm/
http://www.everystockphoto.com/index.php

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