SubscribeCreative Commons and Copyrights
If you haven’t already noticed, we’re pleased to announce that you may now mark photos that you’ve uploaded on Collective Lens with Creative Commons licenses. Our primary goal here at Collective Lens is to promote awareness of important issues. By allowing others to use your photos with a Creative Commons license, you are helping to spread your photos around the web, thus raising awareness.
Copyrights are important, and we take photographers’ rights very seriously. Anyone who uploads a photo has the option to keep their photo as “all rights reserved” with a copyright to their name. Anyone who uploads a photo to Collective Lens retains the copyrights to their photo. While we want to spread awareness and help important causes, we want to do it legally and with respect to photographers. Additionally, we want to give all of you the option to release your images under any Creative commons license that you deem appropriate. You can change the copyright at any time, not just when you upload a photo, and you can change the copyrights on all of the photos that you’ve already uploaded. To do so, simply log in, go to your profile, and click “edit” on any of the photos that you’ve uploaded. All of the Creative Commons Attribution licenses are available.
If you’d like to use a photo on Collective Lens, make sure you check the copyright first! Keep in mind that you can always send a message to a photographer asking for permissions. Also, just because a photo is marked as Creative Commons does not mean that you can now do with it as you wish. All Creative Commons licenses must be attributed to the photographer, and can be used only in the ways designated by the particular license chosen for that photo.
We know that these licenses can sometimes be a bit confusing, so for more information on Creative Commons, visit CreativeCommons.org. Here’s a rundown in “plain English” of what the various Creative Commons licenses mean:
- Attribution means that you must give credit to the photographer (you must attribute it to them).
- Non Commercial means that you are not allowed to sell it nor use it for advertising purposes.
- Share Alike means that you can change it, but you must then release it to others under this same Creative Commons license. In other words, you can’t modify it and then change the copyrights once you’ve changed it.
- No Derivatives means that you are not allowed to change it in any way when you use it.
Don’t hesitate to ask if you have any questions!
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