[cc-community] CC Dragged Into Lawsuit
Joichi Ito
jito at neoteny.com
Sat Sep 22 18:53:02 EDT 2007
For illustration purposes, lets take another real example. I was
writing a wikipedia entry for a person. I asked her if she had a
photo of herself. She said that a photographer she knew had taken
one. I then had to negotiate with the photographer to release the
photo under a CC-BY license. I had to explain that he would be giving
anyone the right to use the photograph commercially. Basically, I had
to negotiate the commercial copyright rights with the photographer. A
photograph, as you all know, owned by the photographer and the the
subject. CC is about copyright. Anyway, now the photo is on
wikipedia. CC BY basically means that the photographer has given us
his/her copyright and it can now be used by wikipedia or the subject
for commercial use.
You can't use BY-NC on Wikipedia. Anyone can take a Wikipedia article
and run ads on it, print it in a book and sell it and BY-NC is more
restrictive than wikipedia would like to be. However, just because it
is on wikipedia, it doesn't mean you can use it in an advertisement.
I do realize that it is different with public figures which most of
the notable people should be, but I think it's important to
understand, and to explain, that just because something is on
wikipedia or in the wikimedia commons, doesn't mean you can put it in
an ad without additional permissions.
Again, IANAL, but I don't think the photographer has done anything
wrong really. During the Photo-Commons meeting at the iCommons
Summit, we did start talking about ways to add additional information
to the metadata or the post that says something about he model
release. For instance, if we can obtain a model release when we take
a picture, say at the conference, it would be nice to post it along
with the photo or provide a link to it. Then someone using the
photograph could see the release and feel a bit more confident about
using it for various purposes.
By the way, in many countries outside of the US, there are moral
rights. In those countries, even for non-commercial use, if an image
is used in a way that goes against the wishes of the author, the
author can prevent those uses. Creative Commons licenses can not
prevent moral rights from existing and in many cases, you can't even
sign away moral rights. In some countries you can always say, "I
don't want my photograph used to promote blah blah blah."
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