Misuse of Creative Commons-licensed photo leads to public apology
blog.wikimedia.org
blog.wikimedia.org
Anyway, for me one point of sharing CC-BY is to just let people use the image without asking. Of course lawyers got involved and the TV station contacted me and said I needed to sign some contract so they could use my image for free ?!???!!
Sorry, I'm not going to sign some contract that I should have a lawyer look at $$$ and that also puts me on the line for any legal issues in the photo that comes up later especially when you aren't paying me. They moved on. Which is fine by me but sad in general that they didn't just take the license as is
They understood the licensing just fine, they also understand covering their ass explicitly. They don't feel like being left to your whims should you choose to change license to attempt to extort money out of them after they start a large campaign.
Fair enough. Naive question... Does the Wikimedia Commons (and other established sites) not address this? Licensees of CC material will find content and license change histories, archiving, and (thus) audibility if a dispute arises. i.e. claims like "this was the license on date X" become verifiable
I'm not a lawyer but this is wrong, if you've released material under a license in most legal jurisdictions that's binding, releasing it under a different license does not invalidate the terms of the previous one.
How do you prove that the license really was granted if I take the website down? Convince a court that archive.org or a printed screenshot is evidence? If I falsely claimed to own the rights to the images, and you get sued by the true owner, can you show you acted in good faith and did enough to verify the license? If you have a contract with me and I lied, you probably would have better chances of recovering your damages from me.
It would be interesting to see how many companies would pay a small fee for this if you asked.
If all they wanted was a signed copy of the CC-BY license I would have signed it
I and a friend of mine took a high-res photo of an insect and I uploaded it to my flickr account under a CC-BY-SA license.
I got contacted by some publisher of a textbook from the UK and the conversation went like this:
them> We'd like to pay you for your photo
me> no worries man, you don't need to, it's freely licensed, just
use it and credit us.
them> Uh, this really would just be easier if we give you money.
me> Ok, if you insist.
Edit: The photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/avarab/sets/72157611383366435/...
What's the precedent for that statement? What's your definition of short term?
(Personally I'll make double sure to attribute images from Wikipedia from here on out.)
The logic is backwards, though - if the license isn't valid, the default in the law is to deny the use of the work.
In general, the remedy for violating a license is to follow through on the license agreement.
GPL V2 licenses are violated on a constant basis in my personal experience. (I used to run a business that competed in the MySQL market.) It is relatively difficult to detect inclusion of GPL code in shipped binaries, for example, especially if the audience of users is not large or the binaries are part of a larger system.
Given this experience, I'm really surprised that this isn't more a of a problem as media really seems to be going into the weeds to find video / pictures of things. I also thought Twitter had some kind of statement in their TOS about this. I wonder what the interaction between externally hosted things with their licenses versus Twitter's TOS.
1) It was on my way home from work and I was parked for a bit
You might react and go "that's horrible, why would they do that?" but remember when Cathriona White died, and every 'news' organization in the world immediately (and I mean immediately) started calling her family demanding an interview simply on the basis of her relationship with Jim Carrey? I seem to recall someone in her family saying that they heard about her death from a reporter calling and asking for comment from a seven year old. He was pissed about it and good for him, really, and I say that as someone who used to be in a slightly more respectable part of that bloody industry.
Twenty four hour news and, later, the Internet did this to us (well, really, we did and these were merely tools to satiate human nature). There is zero regard for "the right time" when interacting with subjects of stories any more by most producers. The right time is now because our readers demand fast content and fuck your feelings.
The irony is that Twitter is probably the one platform that is tirelessly working to make a traditional journalist go back to being traditional by eliminating the urgency of reporting and shifting focus back to analysis and context. So it's weird to watch producers work Twitter to basically digest a primary source and be late by definition. Twitter is way better at telling me what's going on now. I want analysis and context from journalists now, but most haven't picked up on that yet. (This is also why Twitter will not eliminate the media, despite what some people say; half of journalism is placing events in context. Some might say half is a conservative estimate.)
And that's even before you get into the viral video agencies who snap up rights from people who don't know any better, and I can't decide which is worse. Seriously, what a way to make money; what service do you provide, exactly?
I wonder if the problem is the need for more education/outreach to explain CC?
Same thing for a movie that has just a glimpse of this photo or a computer game that displays it once?
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and I am not liable for anyone taking above as legal advice.
ShareAlike is intentionally copyleft, yes. But it isn't clear what would constitute the 'derivative work'. If you had a glimpse of the photo in the movie with a 'Ken Burns' effect, would releasing a CC 2 sec video of that effect applied to the image be okay? Probably. But who knows if anyone would succeed in suing you to either CC the whole film, or pay for another form of license.
Is an article containing an image, used in its original form derivative? Probably not, the Wikipedia citation creator explicitly gives you this option: if you don't modify the image, only use it, then it doesn't prompt you to fill out the derivative information. Obviously that's not in any way legally binding, but gives an indication of how things tend to be used.
For example, there's case law regarding the use of a photo in a movie: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/#...
From my understanding, the argument is that the website or document is considered a medium for distributing the image, but is not an adaptation or derivative work of the image. If the image itself was modified, that modification would have to be BY-SA.
This incident shows that CC evangelists can be just as controlling and litigious as the conventional copyright holders they inveigh against. So much for making the world more equitable and accessible.
"Just as there is nothing in the law that permits a person to dump personal property in the public highway, there is nothing that permits the dumping of intellectual property into the public domain — except as happens in due course when any applicable copyrights expire. Until those copyrights expire, there is no mechanism in the law by which an owner of software can simply elect to place it in the public domain."
Funnily enough, it is Creative Commons Zero that does what is asked for the best.
Creating and maintaining any commons requires rules and work. CC evangelists do want people to use their work, but they also want to create a situation where lots of people use lots of other people's work, which means getting creators to be comfortable offering their creations. CC does a great job of capturing and expressing the common concerns of creators, which makes more work available. But that only works in the long run if those concerns are truly honored.
So I don't think they're being hypocrites at all. You may prefer to release your stuff into the public domain. (Funnily, you don't link your PD-shared works in your profile, so you must not want people to use your work freely either.) But others prefer differently. Looking at Flickr, it looks like the CC-licensed collection is about 100x larger than the PD-licensed collection:
That's likely because CC-licensing has been available on Flickr since 2008 [0] and they only recently started offering the Public Domain license as an option in 2015 [1].
It's good to see them finally offer more license types but they are so late to the game that many people like me just self-published or posted to Wikimedia Commons under the PD license instead, for all those years. I'm sure my images get fewer views than they would on Flickr but I can't be bothered to switch now.
[0] https://www.flickr.com/commons [1] http://blog.flickr.net/en/2015/03/30/flickr-now-offers-publi...
You are free to harass people about licensing if you want, but you don't then get to turn around and claim you're fighting the good fight against overly restrictive copyright law.
If you're litigating against small-time festival organizers for not putting fine print on a poster picture, you're much closer to the Warner Music end of the spectrum rather than the Richard Stallman end of the spectrum in terms of copyright.
Both CC and open-source software use the framework of existing copyright law to guarantee a "fair" use of works, with only few restrictions. Not without any restrictions.
I maybe should not have responded with this provocative question, but to me both movements use very similar tools for similar purposes.
You said it much better than I ever could :). And that's why I used the comparison to the GPL, especially since that has a history of the FSF going to court over violations.
The photographer explicitly didn't want it to be used freely. He wanted it be used for free only by people who gave him credit for his work, which is why he used a license that said so. Per the article: “I’m happy to see my photos spread around, but I demand proper attribution. It’s not much for a free photo.”
> This incident shows that CC evangelists can be just as controlling and litigious as the conventional copyright holders they inveigh against. So much for making the world more equitable and accessible.
Why are you railing against people who fight for CC licenses? Surely it is better than conventional copyright holders, who charge you for any use of their work? Are you against copyright law as a whole, and believe everything should be in the public domain?