I love the Creative Commons licenses. I use them for most of my photos and rely heavily on other people’s CC licensed material. As a result, my photos have ended up in all sorts of fascinating places — in magazines, on liquor bottles, and who knows where else! A great feature of CC licenses for me is that my creative work can make itself useful without my effort. They can go out and find work for themselves and become productive members of society without me needing to shepherd them through the process. The only requirement is that my name stay attached to them so I get some credit. Which is enough for me — photography is not how I make my living nor do I expect to in the future. So recognition is plenty enough for me as a reward. Almost.
The big problem I have with the current variations of the CC license is the “who knows where else” part. Folks are free to use my content, so long as they attribute it to me, without ever letting me know about it. And that removes a big part of the fun for me — I get a huge kick when somebody tells me they want to publish my photo. As a matter of politeness, I’ve taken to notifying content creators when I use their CC license, so they can get the joy. But the license variations can’t require that.
What I’d like to see is a “Notification Required” variation of the Creative Commons License. It would go alongside the current variations:
- Attribution
- Share-alike
- Non-commercial
- No derivative
- Notification (not yet implemented)
It would be executed similarly to the Attribution requirement — somewhere the content creator needs to explain to re-users how to attribute, and in this case how to notify. In fact, I’ve updated the CC notice by my photos requesting notification. I’m asking people to jump through some small hoops to contact me as a form Turing Test. But if you understand English, they’re really pretty easy.
I know others would like to make similar requests when their content is re-used, so I think this should become a part of the standard array of options for CC licenses.