Free up your flickr images – relicense everything as Creative Commons

It’s nice to see your work used by other people – to illustrate a blog post, as part of a presentation, or maybe even printed out and hung on a wall. Yet a lot of people lock folk out from

using their work by restricting usage when by slapping a restrictive copyright notices on it. This often happens on Flickr, where users have set their default license level to be the highest level of control. Creative Commons allows you to control the use of your images in a much finer way. Want people to use your work for anything and everything? Or maybe to only use your work non-commercially? To use as is, or to make new work out of? Creative-Commons has a license for all of things, and you can pick and choose your own set of options. I tend to go for “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic” which means “do what you like with this, but if you want to make money out of it we need to talk”.Why use CC licensingThere are loads of reasons, here are a few:

1. You have no intention of making money from your stuff, but you’re more than happy for people to use it. Full copyright is daft in this scenario.
2. You want your work to get out there as far as possible. CC makes it easier for your work to spread. People like me actually seek out CC licensed stuff that they can use on blogs etc.
3. You’re a pro, and want to give some stuff away as part of your marketing approach. Some of your images might not look marketable, but might still be very good. You can always do the “non-commercial” license and have a conversation about money if someone finds the image and wants it. And anyway, the real money is probably in being commissioned.
4. Ideology: you believe in free culture ideas and an open, free, Internet. Copyright doesn’t fit your ideals, so don’t use it.

How to fix your licensing in flickr

If you already use Flickr but have locked down your licensing, you can use the batch tools to fix it.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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