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Ask Slashdot: How Do You Ensure Creative Commons Compliance At Your Company?
An anonymous reader writes At the non-profit where I work, there isn't a lot of money for buying stock photos or licensing professional images. So, we've turned to sources of 'free' imagery, notably Creative Commons-licensed photos on Flickr. While we're not a huge organization, we do have 100+ individuals creating content in one way or another. We're now wrestling with compliance of the CC licensing, like including links for By Attribution images, etc. Our legal counsel is also scared of photographers changing their licenses and suing us after the fact. How do you document the images you find were licensed one way in the past, especially when numerous people from across the country are acquiring the images?
Send a copy of the image and the license agreement to a 3rd party on concluding it.
you had me at #!
We don't. By the time you add all the manpower, compliance, and lawyering, it's cheaper to just buy it from the photographer/agency with a contract clearly spelled out, or if you're ballsy, try work-for-hire or buy all their images outright. The photographers we worked with, are usually pretty chilled if we forget to renew the licensing. Contracts are there when things get awkward or if you're a big company don't respond to them. Most photogs are small shop independent contractors and they guard relationships very well. It doesn't matter if they shot professionally for National Geographic, they're very professional and accommodating. The Flickr and Craigslist group are flaky in my opinion, and they don't necessarily track tax revenue, much less licensing.
I'd rather just deal with a pro and be done with it. The same way I'd rather hire a licensed plumber with warranty than asking someone for Craigslist for $100. My time is more valuable.
Someone will inevitably leave out the attribution and some people may disagree on whether a particular attribution style fulfills the license requirements.
At a former job, we had a similar situation, no budget for graphics so we only used photos from places like morguefile. We handled it through version control. A subversion pre-commit hook was set up that would reject any commit containing an image file unless specific properties were set on the files (subversion allows custom "svnprops" which are essentially user-defined metadata tags). One of the required attributes was the source URL that the file came from.
I guess this may not have helped much if an image was later re-licensed. Perhaps taking a screenshot of the source site, with some visible indication of the license, would help.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Our legal counsel is also scared of photographers changing their licenses and suing us after the fact.
There's a few threads on Photo.net about phtographers having their images used without permission and what to do about it.
Basically, the photographer would have to send a C&D letter, cough up a few thousand bucks for a retainer and good luck making it all worth while in the end - from the phoographer's point of view. It usually isn't unless your the guy who does simething like this and even then, the photographer sees his image used all over the place without his permission and he just can't get to them all.
If you're getting it as a CC image, there's going to be plenty of trails to support the fact that it was originally a CC image and I'd save/print the webpage that had the image as a CC licensed. The photoog will havea real
I mean really, does your council have any experience in these matters?
It's why money exists in the first place. To make life easier for you by exchanging it for things that are more difficult to acquire.
As you're discovering, it costs you more to worry about being legal than just paying for photos in the first place.
THIS is the reason so many businesses just avoid open source/creative commons completely. Its too easy to get into trouble, or at least, its too easy to worry about getting into trouble even if you never actually do get into trouble.
There are many ways you can protect yourself by documenting the process, but 9 times out of 10, at that point, you've wasted so much time manually documenting the process/object in question that you would have saved yourself time and money but just buying something, which automatically documents your attempt at being legitimate with a receipt/contract/bill of sale.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
So I am a Rights and Permissions manager for a mid sized business that does publishing services for companies like HMH, Pearson, Cengage and others.
Your company should have a permissions manager and an asset database including contracts and rights information (RMS Rights Management System). I can't think of any off the shelf systems but the company I work for has a custom FileMaker image asset database and one of our main clients Pearson uses a system called PRISM (Pearson Rights Information System Management).
You are going to get sued if you aren't using industry standard practices like I just mentioned. I don't know how so many companies get as large as you are mentioning with out a Perms manager.
There's millions of reposted photos there that Joe Pic-Stealer and his friends have marked as CC licensing. So just because it says CC doesn't mean a damn thing.
Yes but even if you buy you can not be entirely sure there's no lawsuit lurking.
God created everything, and he's a Republican. Your move.
1. hire local photographer, with clear contract terms and specific ownership clauses - he's working under contract to you, therefore the owner of any material he produces is YOU since you're the one commissioning it. Ergo, he has neither the right nor the authority to convert any images taken while under contract once the contract is fulfilled. He's been paid. That's it as far as he's concerned whether you use just one of several hundred images or 100% of the entire stock*.
2. I am a photographer. I have my own CMS, it's called an email account. Any images I decide to publish go out using whatever licence is relevant, watermarked where I feel necessary (Facebook was one such situation), and the full resolution unadulterated image goes to the email account and just sits there waiting for the inevitable ownership challenge. I've had to use it ONCE to put down a claim, and that was on a logo. Haven't had to put the bosh on a photo claim yet, it's probably just a matter of time.
*I actually like working commissions, it means I can wash my hands of the complicated business of tracking content even though I only get paid once for the stock. More time for me to take photos, less time updating CMS databases.
Your legal counsel is shit. You cannot retroactively change the license once it is released under CC.
Get a utility that captures the image's URL as a PDF. That gives you a record of the URL when the image was obtained, as opposed to only having a URL to a page that is subject to modification.
I've already hired God (at a pretty good rate even, He only asked for 10% of our income!) Everyone else is SOL since by your own admission none of the other Republicans created anything.
Just use images with a proper license and a company that is willing to license to you under terms that are not so fuzzy. CC sucks because it is so unspecific and creative types just don't understand the ramifications and limits of their choices. The sad thing is that the world would be a better place if CC never came into existence, because then you would at least have had a chance for proper public licenses to evolve.
Otherwise, you are a company, so you could probably just open up a sixpack of lawyers if you ever get into problems.
As for your stated problem, if you documented it for yourself that this was some specific license, then the courts can probably entice Flickr to just state what license was valid at the time.
My company tracks all open source use and licensing in a bugzilla database with lawyers having most access and developers being allowed to submit issues -- completely separate from our normal bug database. Maybe something like that would work for you.
From the OP:
So, we've turned to sources of 'free' imagery....
How about government photos, especially US federal government. Not all are in the public domain but many are and I doubt the license is going to change (hopefully). When in doubt, just ask the agency if you can use the photo.
Even as a democrat I would have voted you down for bringing Repo/Demo conflict into a conversation that is anything but. The vast majority of people don't understand CC licensing. It is something only SOME artists and SOME programmers and maybe a handful of other types of content authors are familiar with, which is a minority of a minority. Even those familiar with the concept are unclear in the nuances of the licensing. So you can bet lots of people from both parties are unfamiliar with the licensing model, and thus you can expect those leveraging such content to make mistakes in documenting the licensing and attributing works. Therefore one must conclude that regardless of the party affiliation of your workforce, you must address this issue.
You sound pretty arrogant, maybe you should join the Republicans.
you have no way of verifying that whoever posted it to Flickr actually owns it or has rights to offer it under the stated license, and if you are easier to find than they are, guess who's getting sued for copyright infringement
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Your comparison seems to assume that just because you've bought a commercially licensed image that you don't have to track it the same way you would a CC-licensed one. You actually probably have to track it more stringently for the commercial one than for the CC-licensed one, because you KNOW that someone's expecting to get paid for the commercial one.
"Hey, you know that background image we've been using for 5 years for the X site? Where'd we get that? iStockphoto? Can you track down the purchase info along with proof that the $3 was for *that* photo? I think that was a few years before Getty bought them, and I think we were still Y Corporation at the time. Man, I sure hope Jimmy didn't just do that on his own account for convenience. Any idea where he is these days?"
Heck, I was at someone's office today where they couldn't find the paperwork for an out-of-warranty laptop repair from March, much less something years old.
fencepost
just a little off
List of all licences and usage and people link internally to the page. It works.
god is dead
I'll mention right up front that most of the more than 10,000 photos I've published on Flickr were, and continue to be, under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike licence. Most of the people who have used my photos have done so quietly, without any fuss. Now and again, someone asks politely if they can use a photo even though it is clearly marked as to which licence applies, and my Flickr Profile also makes this clear and goes so far as to say how I prefer to be attributed. If I think that anyone wanting to use my photos might have problems with the Share-Alike part (e.g. commercial enterprises who want to keep their own licences on the content) I just generally quietly change the licence to Attribution only and let them get on with it. I may be unusual in this way as my intent is to provide a service to the community - and that's what I see CC as being all about. And as a result, many hundreds of web pages feature my photos. And this probably saves them a dollar or two. It looks like a win-win situation from here.
I do, however, reserve the right to change the licence on any of my photos, no matter when they were first published. I'm trying to build up a small fine art portfolio and intend to continue changing some photos to All Rights Reserved. And I've stated as such in my Flickr Profile. But that in no way affects the rights of anyone who has used any of my photos beforehand. As far as I'm concerned, the date of publication should settle the issue of who has which rights. If someone used my photo under CC BY-SA on the 31st of March, say, and I change the licence to ARR on the 1st of April, then that person's rights don't change as regards their use of the photo up to and including 31st March. They don't have to take the photo down, and I won't charge them for its use. If they reuse the photo after that then it's likely to be because they don't know about the licence change. If I find out they've reused it, I'll let them know about the licence but won't insist that they find another photo. After all, I might not know they've reused it until months afterwards. So I'll always err on the generous side. So that I can continue providing a service. At some point in the near future, I'll convert most of my photos to CC BY to make this easier.
Having said all this, I know that some other photographers are far less easy-going, even to the point of being litigious. My opinion is that the Creative Commons (i.e. whoever 'officially' represents it) needs to look at the wording on the CC website and especially any legalese therein, and rewrite it to include information and guidelines as to what should happen when a contributor intends to change their licence. If, as I believe is the case legally, the date of publication is primary in deciding who has what rights, then the website should make this clear to both contributors and users of creative work. Users should be clear that, if the licence on a work changes, their use up to that date is lawful and cannot be challenged; and that reuse of the same work after the date of change of the licence comes under the provisions of the new licence exclusively. Likewise, contributors should also abide by this and not attempt to charge fees in retrospect for lawful use of a work prior to the date of change of the licence.
For me, the spirit of the CC movement is most important, but the letter needs to be nailed down a lot tighter than it currently is.
Garry Knight
It is truly sad that someone who claims to "create" and to earn an income from creativity places no value on his or her own source of income. If you live from the sale of creative goods, then the ultimate end-point of valuing your creative source materials at zero is that your own creative input will be valued at zero.
Valuing your own input (whatever creative conversion it is that you claim) and ensuring your continued employment is best assured by valuing all the pyramid of creativity that you rest on. Otherwise, why will the public not simply bypass your Fat Controller role and just download beautiful, technically accomplished images themselves?
Go hang yourself you fucking troll. Motherfucking wankers like you and beta are the reason /. is dying.
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