[cc-community] Use of CC Images in a photo gallery

Paul Houle paul at ontology2.com
Wed Jun 24 13:03:32 EDT 2009


Rachel Been wrote:
> I have a hypothetical question for fair-use involving using CC images 
> such as those found on Flickr in an online gallery experience 
> incorporating other images licensed through other means (i.e editorial 
> or royalty free licensed images from Getty, lets say).
CC-BY-SA could give you problems.

You're only allowed to use CC-BY-SA images on a site which is itself 
CC-BY-SA.  You can't fuse CC-BY-SA content with content that's not 
compatible with CC-BY-SA.  For instance,  you can't legally display 
coordinates from dbpedia (CC-BY-SA) on a Google Map,  because other 
people aren't allowed to use the images from Google as CC-BY-SA.

CC-BY-SA can be combined with CC-BY and PD images,  but not with 
anything that has commercial strings attached:  for instance,  "royalty 
free" images for which you've paid for the right to use on your site but 
haven't paid to allow anybody else to copy and use.

You're certainly free to mix CC-BY-SA photos with images that you 
created yourself,  but you'll need to license them as CC-BY or CC-BY-SA 
so that the whole product can be licensed CC-BY-SA.

On the other hand,  you can do what you like with CC-BY images,  so long 
as you give credit to the original photographer.  There's no issue 
mixing them with images with other licenses (unless the other license 
has a problem.)

*-NC is just plain evil,  a fundamental mistake that's harmed CC.  Don't 
go there.  Same with *-ND.






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