Creative Commons or Copyright for Your Photos?
By Brian Auer • November 20th, 2007Jim Goldstein started a good poll on November 15th called “Copyright & Creative Commons: The Poll“. It’s a follow-up to the recent posts on the use of Creative Commons, and I ran the same poll as Jim for a week so we could combine our results for a more comprehensive look at what you guys are using.
Here are the results from 145 total votes between our two polls — values are shown as a percentage of total votes.
So we can see that Copyright holds a majority of the votes, but Creative Commons actually has a decent showing at nearly 30%. Breaking the Creative Commons down into its individual licenses…
It’s pretty obvious that the most restrictive license is also the most popular, which makes sense — as photographers showing our work online we’re still a very cautious group.
Brian Auer is a photography enthusiast from North Idaho. He's also the guy behind the Epic Edits Weblog. As a hobbyist photographer since 2003, his passion has been to constantly improve his photography skill set, to share his own knowledge with others, and to become an integral part of the photographic community.
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I voted for “All rights reserved” partly because I’m a bit lost as to how the others work, but also because I can’t be bothered dealing with misuse of a license. I take my photos for personal enjoyment rather than profit at the moment. While I’m slowly changing this, I guess I’ll revise my licenses in the future when I have a complete understanding of how everything works.
“All rights reserved” seems to be the safest option when you’re clueless.
It’s worth noting that use of a Creative Commons license does not entail relinquishing your copyright.
I’ve used a CC license on occasion but no longer. Too many variations on a theme. My assumption is that must people are not familiar with CC and will not be inclined to follow links to read the actual license. In the end, a CC license may encourage use the content creator intended but I doubt it discourages use the content creator forbids.
I can accomplish the same thing by simply spelling out how my content may be used, if I think that’s needed.
I tried voting but it didn’t seem to work, also clicking view results didn’t work properly. My vote would go to All rights reserved at the moment. I didn’t think about Creative Commons until your post last week. I tried finding out more, but so far I’m still learning about the different options. I found this comic to be particularly helpful http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Spectrumofrights_Comic1
I do make money with my photography.
I am alarmed with the rate that people just use photographic work created by professionals and do not feel the need to pay for it. I am also troubled at the way that there is an expectation that photography should be “cheap” as if anyone can do it. As a result, I use All RIghts Reserved on my work so that I have some recourse when it is used without my permission ( it has happened) and I can gain a legal standing over going after some compensation for the infringement.
Mark, many people copy and use photos posted on the web because it’s easy to do and/or they aren’t aware of copyright and/or they don’t care about copyright. Perhaps you already do this, but if I was a pro I’d certainly embed a visible watermark on every image I posted. I’m sure it’s not a magic deterrent, but it would give pause to someone who wanted to steal your stuff and claim it as their own.
Whatever approach we take, it is only as effective as our willingness and ability to enforce it. In that regard, I don’t know if or to what extent Creative Commons can help us enforce our copyrights. Boilerplate cease-and-desist letters? Free lawyers?
I use a CC BY-NC-SA license on most of my photographic and video work.
Most people don’t understand the use of CC licenses, but I don’t believe it devalues a creator’s work nor does it allow for misuse. You still retain full copyright of your work but are allowing certain uses. I allow people to use or remix my work as long as it’s not for commercial use and as long as I am attributed. Once CC becomes well known and understood this will eventually be very beneficial to the photographic community at large. The people who are going to take a CC image and use it for something not allowed under your license are going to take your All Rights Reserved image as well… and in each case you have the same protections. I just don’t see a need for people to ask if they can use my images for things that I’d let them use them for anyway, and I always ask for attribution regardless.
The images I keep All Rights Reserved are client images or images that I’m not confident are ok to share… my personal work is typically free to use within the confines of my license.
People really need to visit http://creativecommons.org and educate themselves, and then choose to use a CC license or not… but most people still have no idea it even exists.