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

Paul Houle paul at ontology2.com
Wed Jun 24 14:46:50 EDT 2009


Rachel Been wrote:
> Thanks so much Paul--
>
> As a follow-up, none of the royalty free or other editorial images 
> would be commercial images, they would all be in the editorial 
> context. Does that change the outcome?
>
    Commercial or not commercial has nothing to do with CC-BY or 
CC-BY-SA.  (It does have to do with *-NC)

    CC-BY-SA has a "viral" property that infects anything that contains 
CC-BY-SA content:  the whole thing has to be CC-BY-SA,  that is,  you've 
got to grant other people the right to reuse ~all~ of your content as 
CC-BY-SA.  That means that all of the content on your site must be 
sharable by others:  you whole site is CC-BY-SA.

    At this point the issue becomes the license terms of the other 
images.  If you paid $100 to a photographer for the non-transferable 
rights to use a photo on your site,  that's not compatible with CC-BY-SA 
because he only gave you the rights to use the photo on your site.

    Note that two people are getting stiffed in this situation:  (i) the 
photographer,  because CC-BY-SA virality forces you to let people  reuse 
his image (but you didn't get his consent to do it;)  (ii) you're also 
stiffing people who reuse the photograph,  because you're granting them 
rights that you don't have the right to grant.

----

    So what about Flickr?  Why doesn't Flickr get infected by the BY-SA 
virus?

    When you sign up to Flickr,  you agree to a "terms of use" that 
gives Flickr the right to distribute your images.  Those terms give them 
the right to distribute your image on terms different from the CC-BY-SA 
license,  even though Flickr advertises that everyone else has the right 
to use it as CC-BY-SA.

    In general,  other rights can exist parallel to CC rights:  if 
you're the copyright owner of a photo that's CC-BY-SA-NC on Flickr,  for 
instance,  you can contract with me to let me use the image under any 
terms that we agree with...  With one exception.  You can't take away CC 
rights you've already granted.  You can take away the label on Flickr 
that says an image is CC-BY-SA,  but you can't demand that somebody take 
the image off another site that's CC-BY-SA if you've honestly granted 
CC-BY-SA images in the past.

-----
   
    Why is *-NC evil?

    The "NC" concept isn't really compatible with "SA";  in particular,  
you can't mix "CC-BY-SA" and "CC-BY-SA-NC" images:  since "-SA" contains 
the right the commercial use and "-SA-NC" doesn't,  a single product 
CANNOT be licensed both ways.  A single product can't contain -NC and 
plain -SA content because it can't be licensed both ways.

    This situation just adds to the confusion of what "CC-BY-SA" means,  
which is bad enough without it.  Personally I think there's nothing 
wrong with making a buck,  and I can point to plenty of harmful,  even 
deadly things that aren't "commercial"...




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