TechDirt reports that photographer Art Dragulis took a photo of
Swain’s Lock along the C&O canal in Maryland and uploaded it to Flickr. Roughly four years later, he discovered Kappa Map Group was using his photo for the cover of its Montgomery County, Maryland atlas. He sued for copyright infringement. And he LOST.
When Dragulis posted his picture he attached a
Creative Commons BY-SA-2.0, license that allows commercial use of the photo in exchange for attribution. It was just one of many shots he took on a hike. It never occurred to him that someone might want to make a commercial use of his image.
But, Kappa Map Group found the shot among more than 10 billion Flickr images and complied exactly with the terms of the Creative Commons license by crediting the photo:
“Photo: Swain’s Lock, Montgomery Co., MD; Photographer: Carly Lesser & Art Drauglis, Creative Commons, CC-BY-SA-2.0.”
Sorting Through 10 Billion Images
Of the over 10 billion images available on Flickr (and over 1 million new photos added every day) only about 349 million of them have some type of Creative Commons license. Of these, only 32,143,573 of the Creative Commons images are available with an “Attribution-ShareAlike" License.
But, if you’re an art director or graphic designer looking for free photos, you can go
here and search Flickr for just those photos that are free to use with attribution being the only requirement. If you search for “Swain’s Lock” guess what is the first of photo that come up of the 26 photos with that Creative Commons license. Why wouldn’t image users with limited budgets check out this source first?
Understand Your Licenses
If your goal is to get your images used in as many ways, by as many people, as possible then go ahead and make your images available with a Creative Commons license. But don’t be surprised if someone uses your image in a commercial way that generates a lot of revenue for that user. And don’t expect any share of that revenue. Most of all, don’t waste your time and money to hire a lawyer in an effort to collect something from the user.
Using Flickr
This doesn’t mean that placing images on Flickr is always a bad idea. Some photographers like
Todd Klassy earn significant revenue from commercial users who find their images on Flickr. They simply mark their images as “all rights reserved” and require anyone who wants to use one of their images to contact them and negotiate rights. For more on Klassy’s operation check out
this story.
Many customers are using Flickr to find the images they need for their projects.