Learning with the Fang

Over the weekend several people alerted me to the fact that someone had ’stolen’ my logo.
Turns out that Richard McManus had (rather skillfully in my opinion) used one of my flickr images in a post on the ReadWriteWeb blog.

And that’s fine because I decide to ‘give away’ most of my rights to my digital content in the hope that someone will find it useful and re-use it to tell their story. No need to ask, just be polite and give me attribution (which Richard did by linking to my ‘mikeblogs‘ flickr account). That’s what:

cc:by or ‘Creative Commons - Attribution’ means.

• Sure, Richard could have made me look stupid - but I do a pretty good job of that myself.
• Sure, he could make money off that post - good luck to him, he did the hard work.
• Either way I gain more than I lose by having my work re-mixed into a new context. Had I licensed my work in a more restrictive way (say cc:by-nc-sa which means reuse must be non commercial and licensed in exactly the same way) it is unlikely that anyone would have found it, let alone re-used it.

I’m guessing here, but I suspect that Richard used the advanced search in flickr and decided only to look for images about ‘readwriteweb’ that he is free to use for commercial work, with modifications. Images licensed with more restrictions would simply not be displayed in the search results.

This is why only work that is freely licensed with continue to be relevant in future culture (but that is a rant too long for the short amount of time I have before sleep time).

Some other places you will find derivatives of my image:

http://fang.blip.tv/file/633462/ - a presentation that helped my create an excellent job
http://fang.blip.tv/file/105776/ - a mashup of Lessig and Downes that they have both seen
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeblogs/323586161/ - my entry in a creative commons competition
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/306021623/in/pool-ccswagcontest06 - an entry by the winner of that creative commons competition
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/300492293/in/pool-ccswagcontest06 - the original image from which I borrowed the cc:frisbee
http://flickr.com/photos/31477768@N00/227948364 - my original hand drawn diagram
seyfang, mikeseyfang