Copyright or Creative Commons?
Most of amateur photographers share their work on the Internet. But what can we do to protect our work without keeping it from spread?
The last month I’ve been wondering how to license my photos, under Creative Commons or under Copyright License.After considering both options, I’ve finally make my choice, so I will try to help you choose with this post.
First of all, we have to understand both licenses: Copyright it’s basically an “all rights reserved” license. You are the only owner of the photography and only you can decide what to do with it. It’s great for profesional photographers, since it’s the best for selling their photographies. Most of the copyright offices will charge you with a monthly or anual fee, something that most of amateurs can’t afford. However, there are some free services, like Safe Creative that allows free licenses (and some legal services for a very interesting price).
On the other hand, Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that offer open copyright licenses; what they call “some rights reserved”. There are different types of Creative Commons Licenses:
- CC BY: Allows everyone to share, remix, retouch and create from your work, even for commercial purposes, as long as they recognise you as the author.
- CC BY SA (Share Alike): Allows everyone to share, remix, retouch and create from your work, even for commercial purposes, as long as they recognise you as the author and they share their work under the same licenses (Wikipedia uses this license).
- CC BY ND (No Derivs): Allows to redistribute your work for commercial or non-commercial purposes, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.
- CC BY NC (Non Commercial): Allows everyone to share, remix, retouch and create from your work, as long as they recognise you as the author and your work isn’t used for commercial purposes.
There are two more licenses, CC BY NC SA (Share Alike & Non Commercial) and CC BY NC ND (No Derivs & Non Commercial), which are a combination of previous licenses.
As you can see, CC licenses are the best licenses to spread your job and cooperate, as it allows you and other people to create and remix without the restrictions of “all rights reserved”. In fact,one of the CC’s slogans is “Wanna work together?”.
Ok, we already know each license. How do we decide which one should we use?
Well, it depends on what you want to achieve.If you are an amateur photographer but you have a large amount of followers in Twitter, Flickr, 500px… you may want to try to sell your photographies. It’s not easy, but if you have a lot of influence or fame you may achieve some sells. In that case, I would choose a Copyright license. Some services don’t allow to sell your photographies unless you have licensed your photos under Copyright. That doesn’t mean that you can’t sell it under Creative Commons, it just means that is (even) harder that way.
However, most of amateurs photographers (including me) don’t have an audience. In that case I would recommend you Creative Commons, because it lets your work spread. For example, maybe some magazine or webpage uses your photographies sometime, because it’s a good work and the license may let them use it for free. You won’t get money, but they have to mention you as the author, what involves a great advertising and a wider range of people that will see your work, and maybe a larger audience it’s worth more than a sold photography. However, if your photographies are licensed under Copyright, they will think that you will try to sell them the photography, and maybe they look for something else.
My decision was to publish my photographies under CC BY Share Alike. Because I really like the idea of CC licenses and I don’t think that it’s fair that someone uses my work to get something copyrighted. I love the idea of using each other work in an honest way and, as Creative Commons says, work together.
