Jessica Crabtree

Today there’s an ocean of photo material available on the internet through open image searches. Some of it is deliberately posted as multi-purpose content, while much of it is gleaned from personal websites by search engines such as Google Images or Bing. In response, there’s a new breed of legal classification for visual/photo art designed to help specify the legal status of a work. A photographer can designate his work under a rights-managed license to specify exactly how much or how little restriction he wishes to place on the use of his photos. This is much more flexible than copyright but is still legally binding. The licenses range in strictness from the traditional “All Rights Reserved” to completely unrestricted “Public Domain.”

The most frequent rights-managed licenses are known as Creative Commons licenses. Most of the photos you see on Flickr or Wikipedia, for example, will be under this kind of license. Anyone who accesses a work under a Creative Commons license can easily find out exactly what level of use is permitted by its author. So if a photographer submits a photo on the web for completely unrestricted use, he licenses it as public domain. If he wants to be given credit in any future use of his photos, he can license it under a Creative Commons Attribution license. He may choose a license which allows any use of his photos except commercial or resale, or a Non-Derivative license, which grants free use but stipulates that the image be unaltered.

Some basic info on Creative Commons licenses:

http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft