Landscape, Nature And Travel Photography

Thanks Jim, for taking the time to interview Lessig. Good work!

A few thoughts:

1. Lessig said: Lessig: “…when they steal a CC photograph, there is a fight, because there is a CC community that gets together and says “this is outrageous”.

Where was the CC community in Bubblegate? There was quite a bit of stolen CC content in that video and no one said a peep. The CC Community should have been just as pissed off as the ARR Community.

2. He says that we live in this culture of people wanting things in one or two clicks and not wanting to take the time to read detailed language relating to copyright. Yet, CC has more confusing wordiness than ARR. Like, how many different licenses there are, what they mean, etc. Not to mention the fact that sites like flickr neglect to inform people that the licenses are irrevocable. I agree with Scott Baradell who wrote the piece “Why photographers hate Creative Commons” for http://rising.blackstar.com/why-photographers-h... when he says that the easiest, simplest way to handle this is to mark a work ARR and then to specify the terms you would like to have it used under. If someone contacts you and asks to use a photo for free, you can grant them the right. Once CC is granted, there IS no turning back and a photographer has lost his rights forever to those images.

3. Most people don’t understand copyright and the legalities of obtaining model releases, etc. So your average flickr photographer licenses images of other people under CC thus giving away rights without consulting the people pictured, as in the case of Virgin Mobile in Australia.

4. I’m just curious, under what authority does Lessig have to develop CC as a system of licensing?

I’m not anti CC, but I think it’s deeply flawed and very confusing.

Awesome photography! Stumbled onto your site by googling for discussions about info photographers put into their EXIF.