Basic concepts of Copyright you should know
Posted by Damian Damjanovski | Filed under Advertising, Marketing & Strategy, Web2.0 & Social Media
Okay, so this has been quite a pet peeve of mine lately, and I thought it time I write something about it and vent with the world in the hope of getting it off my chest.
The topic of concern here, is copyright. More specifically, the use of copyright images. Even more specifically, the use of copyright images by marketing folk and the like in their presentations at conferences and seminars.
Now, much like most of you no doubt, I’m not trained in the legal profession, nor do I claim to be in any way, shape, or form and expert on the matter.
One skill I do possess however, is the basic ability to read and interpret language. With this skill I’ve managed to amazing things in my life, one of those things, is read the Creative Commons website and their different Licensing schemes. From reading their website I have been able to deduce, that the aim of Creative Commons is to simplify amazingly complex and dull legalese into an easy-to-understand and even simpler to use structure for licensing your content to others (and obviously, to use others’ licensed content).
So simple is their system, that the entire license can be summed up by a few simple pictographs, which quite easily represent the entire concept behind the licenses. I would reason to argue that a child, once taught the four basic license concepts, would be able to remember the symbols associated with each and recall what license it represents.
For those of you who may not be familiar with Creative Commons, I’ve outlined below what the license types are:
Attribution
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.
Share Alike
You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.
Noncommercial
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only.
No Derivative Works
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.
With these four being pretty much the only combinations of license you can have, it all seems pretty simple right? If I share my work as “Attribution + Share Alike” that means you can do whatever the hell you like to it, as long as you acknowledge me as the creator, and if you create a derivative work, you do the same. Simple!
So my question is, why whenever I go to a fancy marketing or related event/seminar/workshop/conference/forum/breakfast/briefing do I find myself staring at a collection of images that are clearly sourced from Flickr, and quite often with the Creative Commons mark still on them.
To clarify, Flick allows users to opt to use Creative Commons, but by default gives a users photos a © All Rights license. Which means, without the express permission of the creator, you cannot use that image for commercial purposes.
But some users decide that they do want to use the easy-to-understand Creative Commons license. And so, next to their work, you will often see this image.
So, what does this mean? Well, as you can see, there’s the little “man” icon, which means you have to attribute who it belongs to. And the dollar sign crossed out, which means you cannot use that image for commercial purposes.
Hopefully, this little lesson has been helpful to all those folks out there who are blatantly stealing other peoples work and profiting from it, because that’s exactly what happens when somebody has specified in their license that you may not use their work for commercial purposes, and then you go ahead and include it in your powerpoint presentation anyways, because you just “really really needed a photo of a 18-year-old japanese girl laughing while talking on her mobile phone” and there was no other image out there. Perhaps you could instead contact the license owner and actually ask them if they’re okay with it? Or better yet, actually pay for images from services like iStockPhoto which are designed to help independent photographers and creators to actually make money of their work.
Another rant was written by my good friend Steven Lewis over at his blog on this very same topic, and he probably said it much better than me.
Note: I just wanted to clarify in case anybody out there did pose this as a question – Using an image protected by Creative Commons in your Presentation against the specific license is a breach of copyright if you are presenting in any commercial capacity, including for your job, as a consultant, or to a group of individuals who may be potential customers/clients.
