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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.
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!
IANAL.
For CC, attribution is clearly specified. With their attribution blog post, Stackexchange people are just wrong. They write: "Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)."
However they are wrong, as not the author, but the cc license specifies attribution, you can read the legal code, section 4. c).
So your last point is not very strong, at least not for CC licenses.
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.
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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.
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
Depends on who does the ripping-off. Some small-time business? It's easier to just shame them on social media (and that business' local newspaper) and once word filters out, the business suffers accordingly until they apologize and/or pay you back. You can also send a DMCA complaint to the hosting company, and the site goes down until they fix it (which will hurt them immediately, and get them to pay attention much sooner.) If they lie to the hosting company and say it's theirs, you file a counter-claim and it goes down yet again.
Now let's say that some Fortune 500 corp rips your work off... you'll have your pick of lawyers willing to fight it on contingency (because most will have seven-figure dollar-signs in their eyes.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
No lawyer is going to take that case on contingency, and even if they did...there would be no seven-figure payday. Despite what you may think, damages are based on actual harm and don't explode just because a megacorp is involved.
Even if it weren't some ambiguous "it used to say Creative Commons but now someone is making a copyright claim" situation, the maximum damages figure is very small. You would get the actual damages, which certainly aren't going to be more than 4 figures for a single website image unless you are a well-established or famous photographer doing specific work for hire. Then you would get some statutory damages--Unknowing infringement (such as after a change in licensing from CC) is limited to something like $200...willfull infringement can go higher, but only if you registered the images with the copyright office in a timely manner (which almost nobody does, especially not for images they post online with a CC attribution).
This: is a pretty giant award as far as infringement goes. Notice that they only got $21k for 10 images, and that was with their own dedicated team of lawyers. For the 2 with registrations, they got a total of 300k, which is the maximum for willful infringement, but look at just how willful that infringement was: The infringers were complete dicks about it. They continued using the images for *years* after being told they were infringing, they lied and used fake names, and when it came time to go to trial, they were not forthcoming in discovery. Those are the kinds of actions that piss off a judge and get you maximum statutory damages.
Bottles.
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.
Perhaps not, but if you receive a C & D demand in such a case, just take the image down. If you acted responsibly and stopped infringing as soon as you are made aware of it the court is unlikely to award significant damages, which means the person who owns the copyright is unlikely to file suit. If they do take you to court, go with hat in hand, ready to explain where you got the image, what license you thought it had and make note of the fact that you removed the image right away when you became aware of the issue. You might want to go to some paid services and find out what similar images cost to license and bring those quotes along. Also insist that they prove they are the copyright holder. Be reasonable and the judge is not likely to go nuts with damages.
Unless of course you have deep pockets, in which case, just hire somebody to produce the images you need and forget about this issue.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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
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.
Are you sure it actually works like this? Do you have any sources that have led you to believe this? I'd think that once I've downloaded an image under a CC-license I have the right to use that version of the image (ie. the specific file, and any derivatives I make, assuming I've the right to make those derivatives) under that license forever regardless of any future license changes. On the other hand, if I re-download the image after a license change the new copy is under the new license.
Similar to how I've understood the GPL to work, if a version of a program is released under the GPL that version is forever under the GPL and the best the author can do is release future versions under a different license. Anyone who downloaded the GPL-version is free to do with it whatever GPL allows.
If I'm wrong I'd very much like to know, so if you have any sources you can point to I'll happily read them.
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