Friday 30 April 2010

Writing On Writing - 30 April 2010

After reading Put Your Money Where Your Mouth is again, i realised that i am a hypocrite.

In that post, i used a great photo that i got from the Flickr Creative Commons pool. For anyone unfamiliar with Creative Commons, they are a suite of licenses for intelectual property (photos, writing, software etc) which are far more flexible and less restrictive than the more common Copyright licensing. With Copyright all rights are reserved, which means that the author must give explicit permission if you want to copy, share or reuse the intelectual property. Creative Commons on the other hand has a whole range of licenses covering just about everything between Copyright and Un-copyright. For example, you can allow someone to freely copy and alter your photo, as long as they credit you and don't use it for comercial purposes with an 'Attribution Non-Commercial' license. A complete list of the licensing options can be found here: http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/

So how does this make me a hypocrite? What i realised was, that although i was happy to use Creative Commons photos from Flickr, all of my photos on Flickr are Copyrighted. I remember when i signed up, the choice for the default license came up and i thought i would go for Copyright just to be on the safe side. The safe side of what i'm not quite sure, but i suspect like many other people i just stuck with what i knew. Revisiting that decision, i am pretty sure that i am never going to make money from my photos, so why bother restricting their use? In the unlikely event that someone did use one of my pictures to make money, it would only be because i had licensed it as Creative Commons, no-one would pay to license one of my pictures, so i would not be missing out. Realistically, like blogging i think i would be pretty stoked that someone liked something i had created. 

In conclusion i am going to change all of my photos on Flickr from Copyright licenses to Creative Commons ...  now i just have to hope that there is a way to change them all at the same time! 


In other news, i am a bit happier with this weeks post than last weeks, i think it flows better and i am more clear in the point i am trying to make. The part i am really not sure about is the personal appeal at the end. Is it effective? Does it come off as too preachy? Is it annoying? Again i would be very grateful if you could comment with any thoughts on the above questions or the post in general.


PS You should check out the rest of danielle bigtooth.'s photos on Flickr, they are awesome.


Update 22:15GMT 30-April-2010: Batch license changes can be made on Flickr by logging in and going to: http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/license/batch/

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