Got it. Creative Commons allows me to do this:Creative Commons develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.
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| Image by Lord Enfield (attribution license) |
I can share what I want! Well, not exactly. I can share what people want me to share. The 23thingscity blog has an brilliant section on creative commons licenses as does Flickr and Creative Commons itself.
"The Power of Open" declares the Creative Commons website - power indeed. We all need images for our jobs and personal lives and having access to free, usable content is phenomenally useful. Unfortunately for people who are making money off their images or wish to keep their content 'all rights reserved', there is no way for them to ensure this. By putting anything online you are giving up a certain level of ownership of that content. I don't mean legally, of course, but in practice anyone can steal your stuff. My friend Chrisdonia has a wonderfully ironically named album on Facebook called 'stealing from myself' in response to his realisation that all of his friends use his professional portraits of them as their profile pictures! He doesn't use a creative commons license (anymore), so this is blatant (appreciative) thievery.
The law is a minefield. As a trainee I'm only just getting used to copyright issues, and it is fascinating but often infuriating to communicate. To readers there are so many rules that seem arcane in a free, downloadable, connected web society. Our students find it baffling when they can't print out as many pages of their ebook as desired, and yet they see whole books for free on google books. On Facebook, we share videos from YouTube that have been uploaded by a third party...breaking the rules is just so possible.
As librarians we should know as much as we can about copyright and communicate this to our students. The university experience is about becoming both expert in a specific field but also becoming fully rounded individuals who are savvy about finding and using information. It would be so easy for a graduate to be asked to do a presentation at work, take a photo from a google image search and get find themself fired because the organisation gets sued. Technically, at least. The fact is this is a highly unlikely scenario. For many, many people there is no real incentive to look in to copyright licenses and abide by them. But when it comes to legal there's no excuse. The law sets boundaries (however complicated) to protect people's content and allow them to decide for what purpose it should be used for. Librarians need to explain the purpose of copyright and make it relevant to users; it is clearly central to making people truly information literate. With an increasing focus on internet security and intellectual property rights, we should be mindful that a spate of litigation about digital theft may just be around the corner.
Creative Commons is great for two reasons:
- It's easy. It's so explanatory, even if you have to dig a little bit to double check the license to begin with.
- It's flexible. There are such a range of CC licenses it has an option for anyone willing to share at all
"fascinating but often infuriating to communicate" - so true!
ReplyDeleteI think the ebooks thing is a slightly different but connected kettle of fish there, though: the problem there isn't copyright, per se, but DRM software, and that's a whole next step beyond copyright and into licensing, which is even more confusing!