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Comment by greggman | Hacker News Reader

I ran into the issue that some TV show in the UK wanted to use a picture I have on flickr that's marked CC-BY 2.0 (not SA). In other words attribution required but not share alike.

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

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I had a similar incident with, strangely enough, Microsoft. It wanted to use one of my photographs in promotional material and asked permission. I said that permission had already been given by me in the form of a CC-BY and they were very welcome to use it. It took quite a bit of to-ing and fro-ing before I got annoyed and said that if its legal counsel didn't understand licenses of all things, then they probably should be fired.

For things like promotional material, large companies will attempt to get explicit, signed permission instead of relying on something simply thrown up there on the web.

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.

That's fine, but they shouldn't badger people to do work for free, then.

How about some middle ground where the CC license says if you need explicit written consent, you must compensate the artist for their troubles?

Doesn't need to be in the CC license. If they ask, you can just offer them an alternative license that costs them, but gets them a signed piece of paper. Putting "requests for clarification mean you have to pay" in a license sounds like a bad idea.

Compensation would be worked out in negotiations. That is simple contract law at that point.

Why does that need to be written in to a standard license? If you're giving explicit consent then you're communicating.

> relying on something simply thrown up there on the web ... They don't feel like being left to your whims should you choose to change license

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

> 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.

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.

A random website claiming "this is my stuff and under CC license" is less reliable than a written contract.

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.

It's pretty hard to subsequently argue that you didn't agree if you took the money and cashed the check.

Why didn't you just ask them for money? They surely would have happily paid you.

I doubt that. The picture was a pretty generic picture of a statue in the Louvre which I'm sure they searched for free images for. Also, I didn't want to later be sued by the Lourve if it turns out they needed extra rights (which is the contract they effectively wanted me to sign)

If all they wanted was a signed copy of the CC-BY license I would have signed it

As others have said some organizations simply just want to pay you because it's easier for them legally.

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.

They ended up giving us a few beer cases worth of money for something they could have gotten for free, because their corporate processes presumably didn't jive with getting freely licensed work from some website.

Edit: The photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/avarab/sets/72157611383366435/...

Now if you try to sue them they have correspondence and a receipt. Don't underestimate the power given by just paying for something.

I can see the other side of it though - (roughly speaking) money changes hands -> definitely a contract, non-monetary licence -> probably a contract. IF they don't use CC-BY-SA images often, it might be cheaper/less risky to just offer a token payment rather than getting their legal team to check the CC licence.

Yes it makes perfect sense, not saying it doesn't. Just sharing my experience as a counterpoint to the other people in this thread who are surprised that anyone might ever pay for freely licensed content.

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