A few months ago, Ola and I attended the launch of the 24 hours of Flickr book at a party in London, held at the Tate Britain.
I took some photos. Since they were from an event that I thought might be of general interest, and I wasn’t expecting to use them commercially, I put them out there under a Creative Commons license.
Yesterday I was playing around with the ego surf segment of the DNA tool on Flickr Toys and did a search to see where my photos are being used. It turns out that one of the photos has been used recently to illustrate two articles about conversations and storytelling: A formula for Telling a Good Story, and Take charge of your destiny in the office.
Pretty cool – Ola features in the picture 🙂
The only thing I’m surprised by is that in the second instance, the author appears to have edited the image (cropped it) and uploaded a copy to the magazine’s site, and the link at the bottom of the article is to my main Flickr page rather than to the image in question. It’s attributed, but seems to have been modified. I guess I need to drop them a line.
Update: the editor of the site was extremely responsive and altered both the attribution and the image to use the original within minutes of me commenting on it.
Still, the more I look at the image, it does work well as an illustration of “networking” or “social conversations”.
I think Creative Commons is the best thing ever. If at the very least it makes people think about how they want other people to use their creations.
Actually now that you got me thinking about this I might want to review mine to see what I license I chose 🙂 I kind of know what it is but I picked it so long ago I might want to update it.
I’m reminded of a blog post I read a long time ago; it was a librarian who put up an image on Flickr, she had a CC license that said it could be shared non-commercially, but another person who used it interpreted differently than the original photographer’s intent. The person who blogged this was the photographer but she said that because she set the license she was willing to accept another person’s interpretation of the image.
Too bad I don’t know where that was, I would’ve shared it. But it’s another thing to think about. Would you have let somebody use an image, even if they were not violating the CC license, but maybe you didn’t agree with the context they were using it?
Food for thought 🙂