[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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