tag archive: creative commons

I was happy to share my Hawaii vacation pictures under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, but it occurred to me that I may not have the legal right to do so for several of them.

Three were taken by my wife, but I’m pretty sure she’ll go along with me on the licensing choice.

Two of the pictures I placed online were of my wife and me together, and these were taken by random bystanders. Since I neglected to bring copyright assignment forms to be filled out and signed in triplicate, I think that means the copyright belongs to those unknown — and by now almost thoroughly unknowable — people.

Since they agreed to take the pictures, it seems safe to suppose that they consented for them to be captured to the memory card on the camera, but I don’t know if we can assume they would give permission for me to copy them to my hard drive, to CD, and …

In a post about the relicensing option from the GNU Free Documentation License to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, Richard Stallman writes:

If a wiki site exercises the relicensing option, that entails trusting Creative Commons rather than the Free Software Foundation regarding its future license changes. In theory one might consider this a matter of concern, but I think we can be confident that Creative Commons will follow its stated mission in the maintenance of its licenses. Millions of users trust Creative Commons for this, and I think we can do likewise.

Sounds like a strong endorsement from someone with demanding standards.

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And seems like an opportunity to shill for donations to Creative Commons. They are running their annual fundraiser right now, and for $50 ($25 for students) you can become a member of the CC Network, which allows you to sport a button on your web page to proudly show your support (and link to your CC Network profile page):

And, I think …

I was excited yesterday to hear about a new book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. (Also mentioned in a Creative Commons blog post.)

I wasn’t familiar with James Boyle and his work, which is disturbing, because it seems like I should already have been a fan of such a free culture luminary. He has lots of good things to say on the topic. (I’ve since tried to remedy my negligence by adding him to my “Free Links.”)

The book is available for free online under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial ShareAlike License. After downloading it and reading through part of the first chapter, I ordered the paper copy from Amazon.

I fully expect it to reinforce my beliefs and give me some good talking points about the value of free culture and the public domain. I think it will also challenge me to think about the subject in a more rounded …

Ice House ruins in Tyler, Texasphoto by Terry Shuck (crowt59)Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

I can’t remember when or how I first found Terry Shuck’s work on Flickr, but I immediately became a fan of his photography. It appears that he uses HDR techniques quite a bit, although I can’t tell what all magic he summons with different lens and filters and whatnot.

I liked that he often shared his images under Creative Commons licenses, including the liberal Attribution license which allows for commercial reuse. It was for this reason as much as anything that I subscribed to his photostream. It’s good to find kindred free culture spirits. But then he increasingly released new photos under standard copyright with “All Rights Reserved,” and I soon unsubscribed.

For random things that I stumble across on the Net, “free” has the edge in keeping my attention. …

Navin R. Johnson: The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!

Harry Hartounian: Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing.

Navin R. Johnson: Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 73 – Johnson, Navin R.! I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in print – that makes people. I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.

–The Jerk (of course!)

That’s what I felt like after receiving a copy of the 2008/2009 Rapid City/Gillete phone book in the mail recently. Look!

See, there in the upper right corner:

That’s a picture I took of Sylvan Lake in the Black Hills of South Dakota a few years ago.

The text reads:

Sylvan Sunset, by Scott Carpenter
http://www.MovingToFreedom.org
Creative Commons Attribution License, v3.0

Isn’t that an exciting something? Although I don’t …