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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 #!
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!
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
My company came to the same conclusion. "Creative Commons" is a legal minefield. Commercial stock photo agencies like Shutterstock and 123rf have clear contracts, much better selection, better search engines, and cost effective bulk licenses. If you have legal counsel involved, Creative Commons is already costing you more than commercial licensing. I prefer to pay artists and photographers rather than lawyers.
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.