Creative Commons In The UK

Becky Hogge’s Some Rights Reserved, A View of the UK Cre­ative Com­mons Project is a great overview of the recent port­ing of Cre­ative Com­mons licenses into UK law, with an empha­sis on the rea­dy­ness of British insti­tu­tions to adopt, or con­sider adopt­ing, the licenses.

I tend to use the Attribution-​NonCommercial-​NoDerivs license, which means that anyone is free to use stuff from this weblog (unlikely, I know, but var­i­ous Inter­views have been used by stu­dents and schoolkids) or my pho­tographs stored on Flickr, as long as they give me credit, do not alter the work in ques­tion, and do not use the work for com­mer­cial gain.

All fine and dandy, as I reserve some rights, while making it easier for folk to freely use things I’ve made. But there are prob­lems. For one thing, hardly anyone has a clue what a Cre­ative Com­mons license is, which is why this pho­to­graph ended up, uncred­ited to me, altered and in a com­mer­cial con­text on page seven of the cur­rent issue of The List mag­a­zine. (At least I assume so - they’re good nice people, so it seems safe to say that no one was laugh­ing mani­a­cally in front of their Mac, splut­ter­ing ‘I did see and under­stand the CC license, but I shall ignore it!’ as they put the page together.)

Obvi­ously, in this case, it’s not a prob­lem - I’m pleased that the shad­owy sprayers of the Mary­hill Anti-​Graffiti Net­work got a nice plug in print after Tim spot­ted their work here - but it seems safe to say that this sort of thing is quite common, with print pub­li­ca­tions and web­sites inno­cently scoop­ing up CC-​licensed con­tent because they don’t under­stand the licenses, easy to read as they are for non-​legal types, or, more likely, because the con­tent is not clearly labelled as being released under a CC license. Obvi­ously, as the licenses are applied more widely, this lack of under­stand­ing will fade, but right now, I’d bet there’s a hell of a lot of CC-​licensed work being repro­duced and refac­tored uncred­ited as things stand.

A second issue: It seems per­fectly rea­son­able to me to pho­to­graph, say, a detail from my friend Rhian’s instal­la­tion, or a Monica Bon­vincini wall text at the DCA, in order to put it on the web with full attri­bu­tion, but it seems a bit iffy for me to then con­trol the re-​publication of that pho­to­graph, itself, in a sense, a deriv­a­tive work based on some­one else’s.

Does anyone know how the rela­tion­ship between an image of a copy­righted or CC-​licensed work and the work itself is handled?

Posted at 5pm on 06/04/05 by Jack Mottram to the art and culture category.
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