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Creative Commonsâan incredibly powerful legal tool that many media outlets take for granted, and without which the internet would be a less visual and more expensive creationâreleased a new version of its license last week.
Back in 2002, Creative Commons first published a set of licenses that were meant to ease the way for creative work to be shared and reused. The licenses allowed the owners of copyrighted works to release some privileges to anyone who agreed to follow a simple set of rules for using the works. Usually, the licenses required that the creator get credit, often that the work not be used for commercial purposes, and sometimes that they not be altered. A decade later, the licenses are ubiquitous across the internet: Flickr alone has more than 250 million images that can be licensed through Creative Commons, and media organizations depend heavily on CC photos to populate posts and homepages.
CC licenses were last updated in 2007. And although many media professionals use these licenses every day on the job, it is safe to say that few of them have any idea how they actually work. Because if they had ever bothered to read the terms of the license, they would have realized that, in the immortal words of LOLcats everywhere, ur doing it wrong.
Material licensed under CC isnât just free stuff. James Bond had license to kill; CC is your license to copy. And although using CC is not as dangerous as using a .25 Beretta three martinis deep, there are conditions, there are risks, and there are, occasionally, consequences for breaking the rules.
CC has morphed over the years in response to how itâs been used in practice, and one of the notable changes in the new version is that it requires âcommon-sense attribution.â Originally, not all CC licenses required attribution; it was an option that the licensor could choose. It turned out that about 98 percent of people using the license wanted credit for their work. Version 2.0 CC licenses, released in 2004, made attribution standard.
Although Creative Commons says, magnanimously, that âthere is not necessarily one correct way to provide attribution,â there are better ways, worse ways, and wrong ways. Look at the ideal attribution that Creative Commons suggests:
âCreative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Franciscoâ by tvol is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Be honest: When was the last time you saw a CC notice that detailed? In particular, when was the last time you saw the title of a CC-licensed work included in the credit line? Up until last week, one of the main requirements of CC attribution was including the title. But most of us coasted by on something closer to this, which Creative Commons calls a âpretty good attributionâ:
Although more likely, we tried this:
Photo by tvol
Often, sloppy CC attribution lines link to Flickr pages, which includes much of the attribution information that CC requires, and has served, more or less, the function that CCâs attribution requirements are meant toâthe person responsible for the work gets the credit. But weâre also lucky that as an institution, CC is remarkably flexible. The new âcommon senseâ requirements eliminate the title requirement, but they add a requirement that most people are already fulfillingâlinking back to the source, when reasonable. (If youâre working on the Web, itâs almost always reasonable.)
On the flip side, though, the new version of CC says that modifications of the work must be marked. This wasnât true before; version 3.0 required that adaptations be noted, and in copyright speak, adaptations are fairly substantialâthink of a book being adapted into the movie. The new standards use the less dramatic standard of âmodified.â In other words: Your crappy crop of someone elseâs photo? Take credit for it.
These are the minimum requirements that weâre supposed to be following in order to obtain the legal right to copy and distribute other peopleâs work without paying them any money.
Itâs embarrassing that many media outlets can barely follow these rules, let alone take extra steps to give people nice credit for their work. Creative Commons has long said, for instance, that noting modifications is ârecommended even when not required.â Itâs polite! But, like James Bond, the media industry likes to bend rules when we can and coast by on our charm.
Consider for a minute another group of people whose hard works you rely on and who donât charge you for their servicesâyour sources. You wouldnât identify a source in a story just by listing their name and linking to their bio page. Youâd give some details about who they were and why you were using them in a story. And then youâd link to their bio page.
Just like sources, the good people of the world who take great photos and license them under CC are donating their time and their expertise to help make your job possible. As a profession, journalists could be more respectful of that, by being more generous with, really, one of the only resources we haveâexposure and ample credit.
Disclosure: CJR has received funding from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to cover intellectual-property issues, but the organization has no influence on the content.
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