I found this week’s topics to be really useful for me. Legal systems aren’t the most interesting thing to study, but I have definitely been really curious about what creative commons licenses actually meant. They’re all over the place in a ton of media I like and in online communities. The later can manifest in some strange ways. That I’ll discuss further on in this post. As someone who would like to make content online, this started to bounce around in my mind a lot. I was really glad to see it brought up in this course. It was something that I was concerned about when it came to making educational resources as well as my own personal projects.
This example comes from a website where people write short horror stories as part of a larger collective universe. The stories themselves are all licensed under creative commons licenses, but relatively recently the site has had to go through some big changes due to licensing. A lot of the images featured in the stories weren’t licensed under creative commons and were not approved for use. The excerpt above is now at the bottom of one of the stories were they were able to get permission from the artist despite originally using an image in an unapproved context. This story was written soon after the site began and has been one its most popular stories since. In this case the image of the sculpture could stay with this large disclaimer at the end of the story thanks to the original artist. I think that this is a really important example of why proper creative commons practices should always be followed regardless of the project being done or the resource being made. This story was written when this website was an extremely small project done for fun by a group of writers. The original author likely didn’t give it too much thought and just selected a picture of a statue that fit with their ideas for the story.
Since the site has undergone significant growth and expanded really rapidly, situations like this are suddenly a large issue. The site owners want to keep avoid any potential legal action, but could end up in a difficult balancing act. A lot of the images associated with these stories were really iconic and popular with fans of the website. The original owners for some of the unauthorized images could not be found or reached so the images would to need be replaced. These new images would have to be accepted by the fanbase of the site which brings up the issue of plagiarism. Another precarious legal situation where the replacement images for the stories had to be both unique enough to not plagiarize the original artists but still be familiar and accepted by the community. There was always the risk of fans continuing to use old images in their creations if the new designs weren’t appealing to them. It was an overall bad situation and one that knowledge about creative commons licensing and good practice could have prevented.
It definitely feels like an extreme situation, but I think it’s a good highlight of the problems that can come with the internet and resource licensing. You can never really know when something might get popular or attract an audience. Keeping your resources in accordance with licensing rules is a lot easier than trying to do it in the future or deal with legal action.
I found a lot of the resources featured this week to be really useful for things outside of education as well. CC Search is a really fantastic resource for finding resources licensed under creative commons. Having a large number of search engines in the same place is really great, especially when CC Search automatically filters the results. It makes it a lot easier to use multiple search engines and there’s no need to adjust the search settings on things like Google Images. I’m hoping to use it to find images to use in art if I ever need resources.
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