Undercurrent

This must be what the Germans call a “Lehrstück”: A photo taken by a German photographer is copied from Flickr and printed on the cover of a magazine published by a political youth organization in Norway. The photographer is not asked for permission or paid. Kåre Sandvik who lives in Bergen comes across the magazine and recognizes the photo from Flickr, snaps a picture of the cover with his cameraphone and uploads it to his own Flickr page. He informs the photographer Mareen Fischinger and the local paper writes up the story, here translated and photographed by Kåre. And Frau Fischinger sends the young conservatives at Unge Høyre a big bill.

No doubt Unge Høyre violated her copyright. The Flickr page states “© All rights reserved”, though that warning could definitely be more easily visible. But as Jon points out, there are lots and lots of photos on Flickr that are published with a Creative Commons license (Kåre’s photo republished on this entry is an example – he used the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 license). You can search specifically for these CC-licensed photos and other CC material on Creative Commons search. At the web magazine Vox Publica we have some experience now with finding and publishing such photos – here’s one example. We can do that because the magazine is non-commercial. It works OK when you get some experience, but the process of crediting the photographer is still much too tedious and manual. It would be excellent if it could be automated. That way maybe we could also start generating statistics of the use of such photos in this growing, non-commercial cultural scene.

Considering the Fischinger story, I couldn’t help but wonder if Bergens Tidende had cleared the republishing of her photo in print and on the web with her. Or do they think that the republishing can be justified as a “quotation” in a news story”? At least there’s no such information on the web article. If they had done that, it would have helped clear up some of the public confusion about copyright.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 15:56 and is filed under Photography, The Commons, Undercurrent in English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.