Tag: creative-commons Posts

For those of you who follow my Flickr and my blog, you’ll remember a few weeks ago I encountered some of my photos being used commercially on the Internet without my permission. For a while there it looked like the only recourse was going to be through legal channels, but after meeting with everyone today at a coffee shop, I’m happy to say we’ve all agreed on an arrangement that should work out. I spend a lot of time trying to make sure rights of photographers are respected, and even went so far to do a podcast with the guys at Creative Commons last year. So I’m obviously glad that this issue was resolved peacefully and everyone walked away happy. I’m more than content to put this issue behind me and move on.

Yes sports fans, it’s that time again — we’ve been messing around with yet another plugin over at BraveNewCode. But first, everyone should know that we just put the finishing touches on WPtouch 2.0 today. There are still a few small bugs to squish, but hopefully it’ll hit the market sometime in the next week or two. It’s pretty sexy, if I do so say so myself. In terms of the new plugin, I’ll give everyone a little context. In the last two months I’ve had several people infringe upon my Flickr photo licenses by using my photos commercially. One of those incidences ended peacefully, but unfortunately the other one is still ongoing. While not for certain, I suspect the odd person grabs photos from my blog (after doing a Google image search), not really knowing that photos on my blog have CC licenses associated with them. So to battle […]

I received an email a while ago from an editor at Wikipedia, asking me if I would mind if they using one of my juno photos on a page. The only catch is that they wanted me to change the license of the photo to allow for commercial use and derivative works. I’m a big fan of Wikipedia — I use it all the time. So I really wanted to help those guys out and let them use my photo. Since I paid for the entire Juno trip myself, I have a hard time actively letting other people make money from my work. As a compromise, I offered to grant Wikipedia a non-revokable license for use of that photo on their site, but wanted to maintain the non-commercial license for people using the photo. They came back and said that wasn’t possible, and that they were worried that if someone […]

Why people stop blogging The other day, I wrote a pretty detailed article on my frustrations with how people have been using my Flickr photos, all of which are associated with a creative commons license. In that article, I had an interview with the Vice President of Creative Commons where we discussed what proper attribution means, and some of the grey areas associated with the non-commercial parts of the CC licenses. A few days after I wrote it, Darren Barefoot chimed in with some of his thoughts — there is a really good comment thread over there, so go check it out. Just this afternoon, I was commenting to Rebecca online that I’m growing tired of seeing inbound links to my blog from news aggregators. If I felt these aggregators were around to provide a relatively cohesive website for a particular topic, I might support them. But most of the […]

A while ago I attended a small function and snapped a pile of photos at it, putting most of them into a Flickr set so that others could view them and use them. While sitting at work today, I did a quick Google search to see if there were any other photos from the function, or any write-ups about it. After a few clicks, I came across one site, and immediately noticed that they had used a bunch of my photos in their blog entry. Unfortunately, not only did they not link back to the original photos, but they also did not mention the source at all. After looking at the image links in the HTML, it was apparent that the author of the website had saved the photos from Flickr, renamed them to something different entirely, and then moved them to their own web-server for use on their blog. […]