Fun, weird and sometimes frustrating
One of the key ways to use copyright-protected material is to get a license.
Now The Legal Genealogist wants you to stop panicking.
That’s just a fancy legal word for permission.
“Hey Mom,” you may ask, “can I use that photo you took of Grandpa for my blog post?”
“Sure, honey,” she answers.
That’s a license. And it’s all we need to be able to use that copyrighted photo that Mom took of Grandpa.
But what about all that material that’s spread out all over the internet that we’d like to use? Do we have to ask each and every time we want to use anything?
The answer, of course, is: it depends.
And what it depends on is whether permission has been granted to use the specific material we want to use without asking for permission as long as we agree to abide by a set of conditions.
In other words, whether it’s covered by a license from an outfit called Creative Commons.
Creative Commons is “a global nonprofit organization that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through the provision of free legal tools. Our legal tools help those who want to encourage reuse of their works by offering them for use under generous, standardized terms; those who want to make creative uses of works; and those who want to benefit from this symbiosis. Our vision is to help others realize the full potential of the internet. CC has affiliates all over the world who help ensure our licenses work internationally and who raise awareness of our work.”1
Creative Commons licenses, then, are “legal tools that creators and other rights holders can use to offer certain usage rights to the public, while reserving other rights. Those who want to make their work available to the public for limited kinds of uses while preserving their copyright may want to consider using CC licenses.”2
Pretty cool, huh? And even cooler is the fact that Creative Commons has just launched a new search tool to help us find CC-licensed images we might be able to use in blog posts or presentations or journal articles or genealogy books we write for our families.
Located at https://search.creativecommons.org/, the search feature is “a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone.”3
And it’s a whole lot of fun and a whole lot weird — and sometimes a whole lot frustrating.
It’s fun because it can turn up a lot of materials we might otherwise not be aware of, at a wide variety of institutions that now hold enormous numbers of CC-licensed items. Institutions like the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Geograph Britain and Ireland, Museums Victoria, and Rijksmuseum, just to name a few.
It’s a whole lot weird because doing a search for, say, leopard will turn up not just images of leopards but anything that’s CC-licensed and on the same page as a reference to leopard. (Try it: one of the first sets that comes up is a gorgeous set of ball-point pen drawings for a school project by an exceptionally talented artist named Sarah Lee.]
And it’s sometimes frustrating because sometimes we’ll find an image that’s just perfect for what we have in time — and we still can’t use it.
Remember… just because an image is CC-licensed, it doesn’t mean we can use it any way we want to.
There’s that whole thing about “as long as we agree to abide by a set of conditions,” y’see. Every CC license except for the CC0 license comes with a set of conditions that we must follow in order to use that item. CC0 is basically a license to use material as if it were in the public domain, meaning without any restrictions or conditions at all.4
Except for that CC0 license, every Creative Commons license requires attribution — credit — to the creator of the item. That shouldn’t be any problem for us as genealogists — after all, citing our sources is an essential element of the genealogical proof standard. All licenses shown with the letters BY require attribution.
Some CC licenses are designated as ShareAlike licenses. That means you can tweak or change the work to fit your needs, but you then give anybody else the same right to tweak or change your work to fit their needs. Any license shown with the letters SA is a ShareAlike license.
Some CC licenses are designated as no-derivatives licenses. That means you can use it but you can’t change it or tweak it in any way. Any license shown with the letters ND is a no-derivatives license.
Some CC licenses are designated as noncommercial licenses. That means you can only use the work if it’s not “primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation.”5 Any license shown with the letters NC is a noncommercial license.
And these conditions can be combined, such as CC BY-SA or CC BY-NC-SA.
So there are essentially seven specific licenses, presented here with links to their conditions:
• CC BY-SA: Attribution ShareAlike
• CC BY-ND: Attribution-NoDerivs
• CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial
• CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• CC BY-NC-ND: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
And when we find just the right image through the new search page, it’s still our responsibility to check and see which license it carries, make sure that the use we intend is within the terms of that license — and then scrupulously stay within the terms of that license if we do use it.
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “The new Creative Commons search,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 24 May 2019).
SOURCES
- “FAQ: What is Creative Commons and what do you do?,” Creative Commons (https://creativecommons.org/ : accessed 24 May 2019). ↩
- Ibid., “FAQ: Is Creative Commons against copyright?” ↩
- Ibid., “About CC Search”. ↩
- See “CC0: No Rights Reserved,” Creative Commons (https://creativecommons.org/ : accessed 24 May 2019. ↩
- Ibid., “FAQ: Does my use violate the NonCommercial clause of the licenses?” See also CC Wiki (https://wiki.creativecommons.org/), “NonCommercial interpretation,” rev. 15 Oct 2017. ↩
Thanks. This info can’t be said often enough. Thanks for helping us stay within the boundaries when using copyrighted materials. I have become a huge fan of pixabay.com images. I use them often in genealogical publications and websites. Here’s their license statement: “Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing copyright free images and videos. All contents are released under the Pixabay License, which makes them safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist – even for commercial purposes.” (Of course, we users are invited to post our own images so others can use them. I need to remember to do that!)
I gather, maybe wrongly, that the sources we genealogists commonly use to download pictures, like Ancestry, Findagrave, Billion Graves, etc, ignore the copyright issue and pass the duty to comply with us, the user. They sensibly act as immune third party hosts and leave it to us to figure out if there’s a copyright issue. I don’t see them refer to Creative Commons or any other legal terms. We’re on our own – a good reason to be careful. I still would feel better if I could download and use a Findagrave gravestone photo without qualms.
Not related, but I was surprised to find this in Billion Graves T&C “… Without our prior written consent, you may not …(c) link or deep-link to the Site for any purpose;…” Presumably , I can’t email my cousin a link that I found Granny’s gravestone on “HTPPS…Billion…”.
Hmmm… I reaaaaalllly don’t think they mean that…
They might not have meant that, but that’s what it says: No links, no place, no time. Did they just hire a cheap lawyer who can’t write clearly or was it just easier to ban everything?
Two weeks ago I never heard of a ‘deep link’. Now I’m an expert 🙂 What brought this to mind was a Reuters article * recently about a copyright lawyer demanding money from an online forum for hosting a link posted years ago to a copyrighted picture. Not the pic, just a link. The invaluable Public Citizen group filed a ‘Get Lost Motion’ (esoteric legal terminology) in court claiming the forum is an immune host, which I’m guessing that the lawyer won’t defend (He said he had to check with his client) and that will be the end of it. The lawyer’s job is collecting checks, not wasting time in court.
My takeaway though, is that even if a third party host is immune, no one seemed to be seriously challenging the basic concept of banning linking, or at least deep linking, to a picture. Meanwhile, Billion Graves may send the SWAT team after me for linking to a grave picture. Seems stupid that I can email my cousin to see Granny’s gravestone on Billion Graves but I can’t say “See HTTPS\\…”
* https://tinyurl.com/y2l9abkx and with a little more digging.
https://tinyurl.com/y2jhkfn9
I really don’t think they mean that, but have sent an inquiry about it and will follow up.
One of my frustrations with Ancestry.com and its affiliates is that they put their own copyright on everything, including work they may have obtained from others via others via a non-exclusive license, and do not make it easy to identify the original copyright holders. They also do not respond to requests for permission to use an image or portion of an image, such as a single census page or a newspaper headline.
would you please comment on what one cites… Situation: I “insert an on-line picture” into a power point presentation, and with the creative commons box clicked. the picture (this is of a birthday cake) says “this picture by Unknown Author is licensed under CD BY.” the words ‘this picture’ provide a link. go further? or cite Unknown Author..etc.
My usual Creative Commons citation on a PowerPoint slide is, for example, simply: Unknown Author, CC BY 2.0, website.url.