Technical > Digital Imaging > Selling your work

Selling your work

I'm a "casual" photographer. I wouldn't give a blanket, open ended rights release to any of my photographs. For one thing, the person might use my work in something I didn't approve of, like the background of a child pornography picture. (As an extreme example.) Or they might want to use it in some way that would gain them much money with me getting none.

I would want a "contract" for a particular use, with a particular compensation for me. Although, the compensation might be only my name under the photo.

reply to sykocus

Creative Commons SUCKS. Plain and simple, and NO photographer should be setting a CC license on their work. Period.
Creative Commons Is Bad For Photography
frpm PDN »www.pdnpulse.com/2007/07/creativ···mon.html
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Capturing the images of Colorado
»jdebordphoto.com

No, but a CCL isn't just about money either. It's also about how the photo is used. That's where McSumm makes a good point.

reply to SilverSurfer1
Buzz! Wrong! CC sucks, it isn't about obsession, it IS about knowing YOUR rights when it comes to YOUR images, and knowing HOW to protect those images. © exists for a reason, and also, once you actually attribute a CC license, it is FOREVER irreversible. CC sucks, it is a way for people to use YOUR images and to scam your outta your rights. Look at all the problems on Flickr images being used lately that have CC licenses associated with them, like: »www.flickr.com/groups/central/di···1608353/




»dionidium.com/2003/09/00116

2. Creative Commons licenses are perpetual, irrevocable. From the Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 license, section 7b:

Subject to the above terms and conditions, the license granted here is perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright in the Work).

In other words: A license from Creative Commons is final and forever.

This isn't the first time someone has found problems with a Creative Commons license after using it; Jacques Distler called it quits after Dan Bricklin pointed out liability issues. These cases underscore the need to fully understand a license before using it. It's fruitless to complain later about use for which you've explicitly granted permission.

Liability issues??? Yes liability issues. Like from satn.org which states:

An issue people may not be aware of with the Creative Commons licenses

In some discussions with Dave Winer and Diane Cabell, who is an officer with the Creative Commons project, it's come to my attention that many people may not be aware of some aspects of popular Creative Commons licenses. In particular, there are "representations and warranties" that you make. For example, in the popular "Attribution 1.0" license, it says (emphasis added):

5. Representations, Warranties and Disclaimer

a. By offering the Work for public release under this License, Licensor represents and warrants that, to the best of Licensor's knowledge after reasonable inquiry:

i. Licensor has secured all rights in the Work necessary to grant the license rights hereunder and to permit the lawful exercise of the rights granted hereunder without You having any obligation to pay any royalties, compulsory license fees, residuals or any other payments;

ii. The Work does not infringe the copyright, trademark, publicity rights, common law rights or any other right of any third party or constitute defamation, invasion of privacy or other tortious injury to any third party.

...

6. Limitation on Liability. EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW, AND EXCEPT FOR DAMAGES ARISING FROM LIABILITY TO A THIRD PARTY RESULTING FROM BREACH OF THE WARRANTIES IN SECTION 5, IN NO EVENT WILL LICENSOR BE LIABLE TO YOU ON ANY LEGAL THEORY FOR ANY SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THIS LICENSE OR THE USE OF THE WORK, EVEN IF LICENSOR HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

When you "warrant" something you are (from a lay person's viewpoint) guaranteeing the person using your work that you'll indemnify them against loss if you were wrong; i.e., you'll reimburse them for what they end up paying if they are sued. In this license, you are saying you have made "reasonable inquiry" to make sure that you have sufficient rights to what you are licensing to let others use it without paying royalties. If you put that license on your weblog, you are saying you've checked about everything, including quotes you've made, deep linking, images (including trademarks that may show in the background or people visible without a model release), sample code for patent infringement, etc., understand "fair use" law, and feel comfortable even if someone then went and put those images in a movie or something, or your sample code in a program and sold it. The standard for royalties and damages are different for different uses. (While "fair use" may cover material cited in commentary on an academic weblog, there are stories how even a TV in the background of a film showing a popular TV show requires huge royalty payments.)

This is different than many other licenses that many non-lawyers are used to. For example, the "Artistic License", used for many open source products, Perl, etc., has no such warranty about freedom from infringement. Dave's RSS license ends with "This document and the information contained herein is provided on an 'AS IS' basis and USERLAND DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS..."

Why is the Creative Commons license so strict? That's easy to understand and appropriate: They wanted to make sure that users of the work would have the easiest situation possible to re-use the material, subject to straight-forward restrictions. The burden of checking for rights was placed on the author so it only had to be done once in advance. This is similar to many book and other commercial contracts.

What the Creative Commons people didn't do, as far as I can tell, is make a set of licenses for the casual weblogger, who does not want to consult a lawyer before each post. The Creative Commons licenses say, in effect, "After checking, I guarantee no one will sue you if you copy my work, with some restrictions". What many casual webloggers really want to say is "I guarantee I won't sue you if you copy my work, with some restrictions".

So, what should you do if you want to let people copy your work but don't want to warrant that you've checked everything? That's a good question. But, rather than wait for an answer, I decided I should at least let people know of the issue. The Creative Commons people are right now starting to think about this in relation to all of the other desirable aspects of Creative Commons. In the meantime, there are other licenses you could use (don't ask me which). You could continue to use the Creative Commons license and hope nobody gets sued. It's up to you.

For the SMBmeta Initiative specs, I included a disclaimer saying (borrowing a bit from Dave's RSS license): "This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License [linked] subject...to the deletion of all of the representations and warranties in Section 5a of that license. THIS WORK IS LICENSED ON AN "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED INCLUDING...WARRANTIES THAT USE OF THE WORK WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OF OTHERS." The problem with that approach is that I'm linking to Creative Commons, which everybody knows (or at least should know) does have the warranties. Worse yet, if I used a Creative Commons logo (which I didn't) in connection with my custom license version, that might be considered a misuse of their trademark, since their trademark currently implies that one can copy without worrying about liability arising from disclaiming the warranty.

In any event, we'll be hearing more about this in the coming months. The bottom line for people: Read legal material you use and ask questions if you don't understand something. Legal material is like software code: The details matter. At least the license material you use is in "readable shared-source".

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Capturing the images of Colorado
»jdebordphoto.com

reply to HotRodFoto
Calm the hell down. Releasing your rights under a CC license can be beneficial to business. I suggest you google 'cory doctrow'

reply to major marco

reply to WaxPhoto

reply to sykocus

reply to sykocus

reply to HotRodFoto

reply to HotRodFoto
Its a voluntary license. You select it. The default license on Flickr is still Copyright - All Rights Reserved.

So it screws no one. The people who select it screw themselves if they want to reserve all rights.

reply to jayco437
A licensing scheme is specific in © (see links I posted above) A CC license does NOT benefit a photographer, it benefits the end user, which is usually someone who wants to use your image. And I am glad to say that MOST companies these days don't use or actively seek out CC images, most seek RM and RF © images, thank you Lord above. If you are a corporation then I imagine that you would want to use an image that has a CC license. And as far as I am concerned, CC is a fad, used by people who generally don't have any idea what they are getting themselves into. The image used by Virgin in their ad campaign would have cost them a couple grand to use, generally. Instead they decided to use an image that has absolutely NO attribution to the photographer and gave nothing even to the photographer at all. It was only discovered by someone by mistake who happened to remember the photo from Flickr. This is honestly scary...and I essentially equate something like this to just about no different than someone grabbing one your images, and then going ahead and selling it. It is a 2 part problem,

A)CC is for end users
B)Most people choose CC because they see everyone else doing it, and just think it has something to do with © and are used to the whole "You can't use my images, they are © and belong to me" mindset, while not knowing what they are getting themselves into.

Now you understand my beef with "scamming you out of your rights". As I have said © exists for a reason, and there is no way than anyone who takes an image, creates an image, or has an image of their own, should be using a CC license. It totally devalues your work, without even question.

"There isn't any reason that you can't let a single individual use the image for free (no commercial distribution), then turn around and sell the image to another person with separate rights under a separate license/contract."

This depends on the specific situation I think. Non commercial though is pretty wide open. Including allowing someone to the image to the web, and can allow for redistribution. I can think of several instances where many companies would simply say "NO" to this, when buying an image from you. Many and most want first rights. It is pretty much dependent on what situation...etc....
--
Capturing the images of Colorado
»jdebordphoto.com

reply to WaxPhoto