Personal tale: not asked permission to use my photos

I post nearly all my pictures to Flickr and Facebook with a CreativeCommons BY-NC-SA licence:

You are free:

to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
to Remix — to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

With the understanding that:

Waiver — Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.

I was not surprised when a local band took photographs I had shot and started uploading them to their Facebook page. However, as a band playing at a music festival and selling recordings, this self-promotional use is — to my mind — “commercial”. Therefore the licence they are originally made available under (BY-NC-SA) cannot be applied, and so the band is in breach of my copyright. This is an interesting state of affairs given how vocal the music industry is (as a whole) about copyright theft.

Were a small act to ask permission to use my photographs, as several have done, I would very likely grant them a cost-free licence to do so. So why do I not just offer my photographs under a more permissive licence?

My reasons for using the “NC” (non-commercial) clause are based around not allowing a company or cause that I am philosophically, ethically or otherwise opposed to being able to use my work without my permission. Think of this as a way of trying to prevent my photography being misrepresented, such as when Sarkozy’s election campaign adopted MGMT’s song “Kids” as brand identity when only paying a license for incidental music. While it may seem presumptuous to assume that a photograph I take might end up being the basis for a brand, identity or other campaign, I am using my rights to protect my “artwork” from what I believe could be commercial exploitation which misrepresents “the artist”.

Personal Tale: asked permission to reference my photos by the developers of TrueHDR

I woke up this morning to two messages sent via Flickr.

Dear Marek,

We are the developers of TrueHDR (iPhone photography app); we’ve come across photos you’ve taken with TrueHDR and posted on Flickr, and we really like them. We recently got contacted by Mashable.com, and were asked to pick 10 terrific photos created by photographers using TrueHDR for a showcase of the app on their site. Your photo “HDR Over Kettleshulme” (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mazdotnu/5254986079/) is one of our favorites, and we would like to ask for your permission to include this photo as part of the app showcase (with full attribution to you, copyright of course retained by you, and a web link to your original photo).

Your permission would be appreciated. Please also let us know how you would like the photo to be attributed, e.g., your first and last name.

To give you an idea of the format/style in which it would be published, here is an earlier showcase Mashable created for the app “ColorSplash”:

http://mashable.com/2011/05/09/iphotography-color-splash/

Thanks for your help,
Yuanzhen Li
Pictional LLC

HDR Over Kettleshulme © by maz.nu

This was followed by another email asking about a second image I’d taken using TrueHDR on my iPhone.

Peninsula north of Llangrannog © by maz.nu

I replied that I was happy for Pictional to use my images — not only had I already published the pictures under a CreativeCommons licence, but the exposure would come at a good time for me.

A couple of weeks later I receive another message and saw that the article had been published on Mashable: Top Ten TrueHDR iPhone Photos. I’m rather pleased to have received this little bit of “exposure” and add something to my tear sheet as a published photographer!