Creative Commons and Copyright

READING: in a Digital Age, Advancing a Flexible Copyright System.

Assume that every image on the Web is copyrighted.

It is therefore illegal to download images from the web without permission.

Likewise, any image you create yourself, whether it’s a drawing on a napkin or a doodle on a whiteboard, is automatically copyrighted and you, as the author, can determine how it’s used.

1. The SPECTRUM: from Public Domain on one side, to Commercial Image Licensing Services on the other, with the Creative Commons in the middle

1. Public Domain (Wikipedia definition)

Works in the public domain are those whose exclusive intellectual property rights have expired,[1] have been forfeited,[2] or are inapplicable.[3]For example, the works of Shakespeare and Beethoven, and most of the early silent films, are all now in the public domain by either being created before copyrights existed or leaving the copyright term.[1] 

• Images taken by government photographers, such as all the images from NASA, or the images from National State Parks, are in the Public Domain.
• Images published before 1923, unless a new copyright license has been issued, are often in the public domain.
• This image here was published in 1922, and is in the public domain.
• Images can be released into the public domain. (EXAMPLE from Wikimedia Commons)

2. Commercial Image Licensing Services: GETTY IMAGES WEBSITE

Biggest and most significant stock photo one is Getty Images, owned by Microsoft.

Acquired ImageBank in 2000

Acquired Stockphoto in 2006

Acquired Corbis in 2016

Affiliated with Alamy 

• Take students through the licensing of an archival photo.
• Very interesting to point out to students how much an Editorial/Archival photograph would cost on the cover of a book, or inside a magazine….explore with them the licensing process so they can understand the $$ value attached to images.
• HERE is a 2:51 min video I made to explain how I get an image price with Getty Images: http://screencast.com/t/FLaprtqzoV. Don’t show this in class, please, just watch it so you can do this yourself!  

3. Creative Commons

1. REFER TO READING. A little historical context--the CC was started in 2002. What an amazing project. The commons came out from dissatisfaction from our exceedingly harsh  copyright laws (70 years + a lifetime for a single author; 120 years for a corporate author). Creative Commons is a layer of licenses on top of copyright, and allows people to determine what rights they want to put on their intellectual property.
2. Take students to the website: Creative Commons
3. Play the video: Creative Commons video
4. License description: help students get comfortable with the 6 different licenses within the CC:

Attribution (CC BY)
Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA)
Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND)
Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC)
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA)
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND)

Go to Wikipedia’s page on the Monarch butterfly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch_butterfly and note the two images and their licenses: one is under the attribution-share alike license; the other is a “copyleft” license, which predates the CC (beginning in 1976!), and lets people use the work but demands attribution.

E. Flickr/Explore the Commons: HERE IS A 30sec VIDEO SHOWING YOU HOW TO GET TO THE COMMONS, which is now made up of thousands and thousands of museums and libraries, who have all digitized their images at high resolution and have made most of their images available without copyright restrictions.
F. EXPLORE: FORTEPAN IOWA  (go to the ABOUT) section, too. This is a great local example of a Creative Commons website. Compare the images in Fortepan Iowa with the images from GETTY.