copyright – English

Keeping it legal: Images licensed through Creative Commons

jamesk — Sat, 24 May 2014 13:32:28 +0000

Photo: flickr/Kristina Alexanderson: CC BY-4.0

Let’s say you’ve got a blog or a news website and you want a free image for your article or post. You could just go to Google Images and copy the first one you see but you could well be infringing on someone’s copyright. This isn’t just unfair to the photographer or graphic designer, it could also end up being expensive for you if they demand damages. A legal alternative is to look for images with a Creative Commons (CC) license, which allows you to use the pictures under certain conditions. onMedia’s Kyle James, who’s a CC fan, goes into the details.

Those of you who have read my onMedia posts before may have noticed many of my images are credited with a formula that looks like this: “Photo: flickr/(a screen name).” What that means is I’ve found the images on flickr, a photo and video-hosting site. But I can’t just copy any image from flickr – just those with Creative Commons licenses, meaning the creator of the image has said it’s fine if others use it, as long as they follow a few stipulations.

Image: flickr/Irish Typepad: CC BY-NC-SA-4.0

Using CC-licensed images means you don’t have to worry about breaking copyright law and risk the chance that some angry photographer takes you to court.

And, best of all, they are free! After all, not everyone has the budget to buy images from Shutterstock or Getty Images, or has access to the AP photo database. So CC is a great alternative.

A little history

Creative Commons is a non-profit group founded in 2001. It aims to be something of a halfway house between full copyright, the default “all rights reserved” version and an intellectual property free-for-all, where anyone can use anything created by anyone at any time. So, CC has a “some rights reserved” model, the details of which we’ll go into a little later.

Image: John Randell [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The CC folk believe the more people can access creative works, the better. And that sharing is better than holding onto things too tightly. (Read more about their philosophy here.)

CC licenses are not limited to photographs. Books, plays, movies, music, articles, blogs, websites and even databases can be licensed under the CC system. But for this post, we’re focusing on images.

The common licenses

When someone creates a work—snaps a photograph or doodles a cartoon character—they can go to the Creative Commons website and decide which license they want to apply to their image. There are several main restrictions they can decide on; they have a two-letter acronym and icons. The most common ones are as follows:

(BY) Attribution – All the licenses require you to credit the original author in the way they want to be credited. It’s not always their name, as I found out in the occasionally interesting handles (names) people use on flickr.
(NC) Non-commercial – People can use the work but they can’t use it to make money. If a profit is going to be made off it, you will need to talk to the creator of the work.
(ND) No derivatives – The work has to be used in its original form. That means you can’t alter or photoshop the image in any way.
(SA) Share alike – The image can’t be placed under any different or more restrictive terms for re-use than those set by the original creator of the image.

The above license terms can be combined in various ways, creating different types of licenses. The six regularly used ones are:

BY – Redistribution is allowed if the creator of the image is credited.
BY-ND – This allows for redistribution, even for profit, as long as the creator is credited and the image is used in its unchanged, original form.
BY-NC – The image can be used for non-commercial purposes only and the creator must be credited.
BY-SA – Attribution is necessary in this case and no different restrictions can be put in place than set by the creator of the image.
BY-NC-ND – Money cannot be made off of the image, the photographer must be credited and the original form of the image cannot be changed.
BY-NC-SA – Credit must be given where credit is due, profit is out of the question, and the license of derivatives must remain the same as the one put on the original work.

Whew! There’s some alphabet soup but it’s important to know so you can be sure you acting in line with the wishes of the image creator.

How to attribute

You’ll notice that all of the license types include attribution. What that attribution should look like is a matter up for debate; there is no set standard. However, there are some things you should take into consideration when attributing to make sure that the image creators are getting the credit they deserve. In the past, I’ve used the formula: Photo: flickr/(creator’s flickr handle). Then I made the credit an active link that goes to the page of flickr where I found the work.

Photo: flickr/Kyle James: CC BY-NC-4.0

But, some don’t think this is quite enough. I tend to agree with them so as you can see in this post, I’ve now changed to the following option: I have included the Creative Commons the work is licensed under, such as CC BY-NC-4.0. (4.0 refers to the latest license version). If you want, you can even link to the license description on the CC website. Others prefer including the photo’s title, for example, my picture to the left could be captioned:

“Woman in Rickshaw” by Kyle James is licensed under CC BY-NC-4.0.

I think that’s a little long but it’s definitely thorough!

Wikimedia even offers suggested attribution text.

It’s also nice to send a message to the creator (which you can easily do on flickr), telling the image author you’ve used the photo and maybe a link to it. It makes everyone feel good.

What is NOT correct is something like this: Photo: Creative Commons. Why? Well, the author’s name is not mentioned, there’s no link to the original photo, no title and there’s no mention of the license. Creative Commons is the organization, not the license. They’ve got a more exhaustive list of attribution best practices here.

Finding CC images

So now you’ve got the basics of CC. Now, how do you find your images? Creative Commons has a search page that puts you in touch with a treasure trove of usable media. You enter a search term and then you can choose a variety of places to look, from flickr to Google Images to WikiMedia Commons to other sources. It also gives you options for searching for other CC-licensed media, such as video or music.

Image: flickr/Vince Welter: CC BY-NC-SA-4.0

You can search, of course, directly at flickr, and they’ve changed their interface to make looking for CC images easier. After you’ve entered the search term, on the results page a few drop-down menus appear, including one called “License.” Just make sure you choose Creative Commons. Compfight, which is a gateway to flickr images, is useful. There are some handy search options easy to access and it appears to load faster and display more photos per page than its source site. So, you don’t have to scroll through page after page of flickr pics. Others options include Photopin, flickrstorm or Free Images (it’s not a CC site, per se, but has uploaded pictures that are often royalty free. But you have to check on each picture to see what the usage rights are.) Try out a few and see which one has the features you like.

Author: Kyle James

35 million images now free for sharing

Guy — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 13:30:25 +0000

Getty Images has made a big part of its photo collection free for embedding in non-commercial blogs and sharing via social media.

It’s a very bold move for one the world’s biggest photo agencies, and for an industry that is highly protective of copyright.

Getty says the Internet makes it easy for its images to be used without permission or with proper attribution when people right-click and save a photo from a website or grab a screen shot.

By removing their watermark and making images free for non-commerical use, the photo agency says its images will appear in a custom “Embedded Viewer”: think of YouTube’s embedded player. This “Embedded Viewer” includes the proper copyright information, and when you click on the image, it takes users back to the licensing page on Getty’s website.

How it works

Users can simply log-on to the Getty Images site; search for an image and click on the embed tool icon.

A pop-up box with the iframe HTML embed code appears. You simply copy and paste the HMTL code for the image into your blog.

The images available under the updated terms of service also come with share buttons for Twitter and Tumblr and provide a link for the image to be shared.

As you can see from the example at the top of this post, the photographer and Getty Images are clearly attributed. However, the viewer does not provide a caption or a mouse roll over function to offer more information about the image. You have to click on the image to find out more from the licensing page.

In this instance we’ll of course offer the professional courtesy to Kai Wiedenhöfer, the photographer whose exhibition Wall on Wall was displayed on a section of the Berlin Wall last year.

Read the fine print

It’s well worth reading the terms of service before diving in. Getty Images reserves the right to remove images (which may mean images disappear from blogs or it could lead to dead links shared on social media); to gather meta data about how you use images; and, to place advertisements with the images on the “Embedded Viewer”.

“Where enabled, you may embed Getty Images Content on a website, blog or social media platform using the embedded viewer (the “Embedded Viewer”). Not all Getty Images Content will be available for embedded use, and availability may change without notice. Getty Images reserves the right in its sole discretion to remove Getty Images Content from the Embedded Viewer. Upon request, you agree to take prompt action to stop using the Embedded Viewer and/or Getty Images Content. You may only use embedded Getty Images Content for editorial purposes (meaning relating to events that are newsworthy or of public interest). Embedded Getty Images Content may not be used: (a) for any commercial purpose (for example, in advertising, promotions or merchandising) or to suggest endorsement or sponsorship; (b) in violation of any stated restriction; (c) in a defamatory, pornographic or otherwise unlawful manner; or (d) outside of the context of the Embedded Viewer.

Getty Images (or third parties acting on its behalf) may collect data related to use of the Embedded Viewer and embedded Getty Images Content, and reserves the right to place advertisements in the Embedded Viewer or otherwise monetise its use without any compensation to you.”

Is free going to be profitable?

It will be interesting to see if other large photo agencies or collections follow this path to “monetise” their images with embedded advertisements. Moreover, it will be interesting to gauge the reaction of Getty staff photographers and stringers. The Getty Images’ website will most likely become one of the go-to sites for free images for web publishers, but photographers might wonder whether they are getting a good deal.

For journalism trainers, it adds another twist to that very important ethical discussion about copyright, licensing and fair use of images.

For more in-depth analysis on this new feature from Getty Images, check out the British Journal of Photography.

Author: Guy Degen

UPDATE (07.03.2014): In the original post, I showed an example demonstrating that when you manually adjust the HTML dimensions to publish a smaller image, the text showing the photographer’s name and Getty Images does not appear. It looked like you could crop the bottom part of “Embedded Viewer”. At some point today the HTML for the smaller embedded image changed. And now, it clearly shows the photographer’s name and Getty Images. So here’s how it looks now and the original HTML we posted is below. Could be a little lesson here too. If you’re going to rely on the embedded GI photos they can change.