Flickr Now Includes Creative Commons License in Embedded Photos

Wow.

I just noticed that Flickr Now Includes Creative Commons License in Embedded Photos.

You can see the Creative Commons License if you hover yh our cursor over the photo.


IMAGE: Creative Commons License in Embedded Flickr Photo

Amazing.

I think we've been asking for this for 10 years.

Flickr Needs to Update Creative Commons Support

Stata Watercolor, originally uploaded by stevegarfield CC BY-NC-SA

I've manually gone in and custom coded the way I want my flickr photos posted to my blog. I've added the Creative Commons license. Creative Commons is a cool way to allow people to share your work.

From the Creative Commons site:

Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.

We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.

Flickr should automaticaly post the photo and license information for everyone's photo when their photo is shared on another site.

They don't do this.

Note: Flickr makes it easy to share photos with the 'Blog This' and 'Share This' links on each photo's page.

You Can Modify Your Own 'Blog This' Settings
Flickr allows you to modify the photo caption on your own photos. I modified mine to look like the caption above.

BLOG THIS
When you click on blog this from your own flickr account, this modified caption gets posted to your blog.

Creative Commons
Over on the creative commons site, you can choose a license, and get custom code genereated that you can use.

Here's the code that was generated for this photo:

Stata Watercolor by Steve Garfield is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.flickr.com.

I'm thinking about combining the two.

Flickr Should Suport Creative Common for BLOG THIS and SHARE THIS
The larger question though is why doesn't Flickr support the creative commons code when you use 'blog this' or 'share this/embed' from someone else's photo?

That's when it's most needed.

Here's a photo I grabbed from kk+ by clicking Share This, then clicking embed:



Obviously flickr knows the Creative Commons license already. Why can't they generate the license along with the attribution to the photographer something like this:


IMG_9100 by kk+, on Flickr CC BY-NC-SA

Flickr Needs to Update Thier Creative Commons Licenses
One more thing, this license is old. There's a new one flickr should be using.

"A new version of this license is available. You should use it for new works, and you may want to relicense existing works under it. No works are automatically put under the new license, however."

Over on the Flickr Ideas message board updating creative commons is being discussed. I asked for an update.

I'm also talking with Creative Commons about this.

Creative Commons Plus: Coming Soon

Larry Lessig talks about future enhancements to the CC license including CC+, On what exactly happened Saturday night (Lessig Blog):

"CC+: This protocol enables a simple click through ability to get rights or permissions beyond those provided by a CC license. So, e.g., a Flickr photo licensed under a BY-NC license could have a simple click through to some agent to provide commercial rights for that photo. We announced with a bunch of partners already. But really key was:
Yahoo announced it was baking CC 'into the system' of Yahoo, making it possible for any Yahoo service to offer content using the CC infrastructure."

This is very cool.

I first talked about this in September of 2006, Proposal: Creative Commons 50/50 License. Andy Carvin enhanced my idea and blogged about it the next day, A New Idea: A Creative Commons RevShare License.

CrunchGear Photo Attribution Policy: "Complain and it gets fixed."

CrunchGear Photo Attribution Policy: "Complain and it gets fixed." - Originally uploaded on flickr by stevegarfield.

CrunchGear wrote about a PVRblog post about my Comcast TiVo install blog post and used one of my photos of the Comcast TiVo display without attribution.

After writing 5 comments on the post and emailing the CrunchGear editor, they added attribution.

I asked:
"Do you have policies in place regarding photo use and credit?"

Editor, John Biggs replied:
"Yes. Complain and it gets fixed."

Me:
Can I quote you on that?

John:
"Sure"