The organisation Creative Commons promotes the use of several ‘Creative Commons’ licenses (CC licences) that are inspired by open source software licensing. Applying to non-software works (text, images, videos, etc.), Creative Commons enables right holders to give the public permissions to make use of their works on conditions of their choice.
- Licensed images with Creative Commons
In that sense, copyright holders retain the control of their copyright, while allowing certain use of the work: all rights on the image, or just some of them. In other words, Creative Commons offers an online form that enables the right holders to configure exactly which of their exclusive rights they agree to give away. Several questions are asked to define the extent of the licence, such as: Would I like to give permission to the use for commercial purposes?, Would I like to give permission to modifications of my work?, etc
Among others, the most common licensing attributed by right holders is an Attribution licence (BY), with permits anybody to use their images however they wish, provided that they give credit (ie ‘attribution’) to the right holders in the form they prescribe. Such a solution has therefore the merit to promote an easy, fair and legal way to share rights with others.
Created to propose an alternative solution to the issue of infringements of digital images, the policy of Creative Commons keeps the interests of the right holders in all events, as provided by their warning on their website:
“Please note that search.creativecommons.org is not a search engine, but rather offers convenient access to search services provided by other independent organizations. CC has no control over the results that are returned. Do not assume that the results displayed in this search portal are under a CC license. You should always verify that the work is actually under a CC license by following the link. Since there is no registration to use a CC license, CC has no way to determine what has and hasn’t been placed under the terms of a CC license. If you are in doubt you should contact the copyright holder directly, or try to contact the site where you found the content” CC licenses are therefore a valuable tool for right holders against copyright infringements of digital materials (ranging from videos, songs and images to educational and scientific works), as long as the public abides by the conditions they have specified. However, CC licenses face practical problems that impede their impact on digital copyright infringements, as will be seen below. 2) Problems with authorisation-based solutions At first sight, authorisation-based solutions seem to be able to counter the alarming situation of copyright infringements of digital images. However, a closer inspection reveals the complete opposite. In fact, believing that such propositions are the solution to the problem may seem utopian. Authorisation-based solutions can be a solution regarding right holders’ interests, but a problem regarding users’ interests. Indeed, regarding users interests, using images from stock images or with a CC license is used to be very time consuming, since users have to find what images they can freely and legally use. In this regard, users are at the mercy of how the right holder or the website has arranged the images and which words have been used to tag them. In order to find the suitable picture, the user will search terms, sift through pages of photographs, try to find one that fits the expectation and budget and try to resist the temptation to just take anything without any consideration to copyright law. As well as being time consuming, many, if not the vast majority of digital images that are legally available online, are generally of poor quality. In fact, there is a common assumption that free images sites offer images with low resolution, or with simplest features. People are therefore inclined to use high-quality images, although it is against someone’s copyright. The low quality is even emphasized when free pictures are compared to paid pictures. Free ones are often shot by amateurs or as candid and it was an afterthought to upload it for use by others. This can be seen in the composition, the colouring, and even the actual pixels or picture quality. That does not mean that all paid images are better, but paid images will more likely offer better quality all around. Therefore, the fact that free digital images are nowadays not really successful is not surprising, as they are usually of lesser quality, require links or are far too small to use for anything practical. Moreover, other disadvantages come from the fact that they will be seen in multiple places since anyone can have them. In addition, most likely people will not find exactly what they need. However, paid pictures also present several problems. As a matter of course, they can be excessively costly and are usually subject to several restrictions. Indeed, the use of paid images is often excluded for commercial purposes, and necessitates additional research to find the exact handling. 3) Conclusion In conclusion, on the one hand, a photographer who authorises the use of his work, via a Creative Common license, will at prima facie encourage people to stop infringing copyright. On the other hand, the fact that those images are legally offered to images of poor quality encourages people to rely illegally on images of good quality, which only makes the problem worse. In short, given the costs and/or low quality of legal licensed images, the high quality, inexpensive, and conveniently available with infringing copies are more attractive to users, regardless of whether these copies are licensed or not. [1] Creative Commons Organisation website: https://search.creativecommons.org/
