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Licensing Guilt

I bought a digital SLR the other day and after taking some 300 test shots I wanted to upload a few of them to my Flickr account. It’s been months since I’ve actually logged into my account and so when I did I was greeted by a random message from another Flickr user. She apparently really liked a photo I took a few years ago of chess players in Harvard Square’s ABP. She requested permission to use the photo but had a deadline which lapsed weeks ago. I noticed then that Flickr is *way* ahead of the game and allowed me to batch change ALL the licensing of my photos to Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial. I still can’t find a way to make this the default setting but at least the options are there to change them in a batch like fashion. This is the power of the CC license. Students should not have to ask for permission like this to put a photograph in their paper. The current copyright laws of the US make this situation a burden on ME. That’s correct, me. As a photographer (amatuer/hobbyist) I love that anyone looks at my photos and derives even the smallest amount of joy from them. This is obviously in stark contrast to what the RIAA promotes. According to their philosophy artists will not produce content if they are not paid. Well here I am producing content for free and now regretting that someone wasn’t able to copy my work into theirs.

This was written by zeroday. Posted on Friday, July 7, 2006, at 12:52 am. Filed under Non Sequiter, Rights Online. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.

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