I believe your approach is fine. But I guess the question is whether the license refers to “this photograph” or “this representation of this photograph.” I believe it’s the latter, and it’s fairly routine on Wikipedia for us to advise photographers who want to preserve some rights to do this.

However, I am not a lawyer, I’ve never played one on TV. You should probably ask a lawyer, if you really need a good answer to that. Or at least read the CC license carefully, with an eye toward that question.

The legal code says the following:

“Work” means the copyrightable work of authorship offered under the terms of this License.

Oh, interesting enough — the front page of creativecommons.org currently has a survey asking what “commercial work” means to you.

However, the “no commercial use” provision is widely known to be tough to pin down.

The more I consider this issue, the more I believe that the “non-commercial” provision should simply be left out of the CC menu. CC offers a great service when their licenses offer a clear delineation of the legal status of a contract. When it gets into hazier notions like “what constitutes commercial use”, I think it might become a DISservice to present the appearance of clarity where, in fact, there is none.

Aaron, I think you provide a good reason for opting out of CC licensing. I’m a huge advocate of building the commons, but that doesn’t mean it’s for everyone, in every situation. However, one other option might be to offer lower-resolution versions of your images under CC-BY-SA licenses. That will give you added exposure without putting your full-res work at risk; also it would make it possible to use lower-res versions of your work in places like Wikipedia. A win for everybody, no? The only drawback I see is that Flickr doesn’t offer an easy way to license different resolution versions of your files.

Outside of CC licensing there is the fair use portion of copyright law, which provides for the use of copyrighted works without the permission of the copyright holder. There are 4 criteria that are applied on a case-by-case basis. Commercial use is not one of the four criteria for determining fair use. Here’s alink to the Copyright Office page on fair use, .

One use that has been consistently ruled fair use over the years is news reporting. Using a copyrighted work, without the permission, to aid in reporting news is considered fair use. In fact, various media have used copyrighted work under fair use for years.

I don’t think that any blog or website that uses a copyrighted work, whether or not the work is under CC, necessarily violates copyright law simply because it also has advertising. If that were the case then all news organizations would be in violation of copyright.

It’s more a matter of how the site uses that copyrighted work. Using a photo in a post that can be considered news reporting would fall under fair use, while using it in an ad or other promotion would clearly violate copyright law. Here’s another interesting link on fair use.

I believe that the CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license helps defines the free use of copyrighted works but, in light of fair use, its relatively clear what is and isn’t commercial use.

A fact of life is that as long as copyrighted work is published on a site like flickr, there is a reasonable chance that the work will be used, without permission, for certain uses.

Personally, if at all possible:
-I will seek permission first to use works that are copyrighted. If there is any doubt I won’t use the work.

-If there is a CC license, I will use the work without asking permission but will always give attribution to the copyright holder in the form that exists on the source, whether it is the username on a site or the actual name, and a link if possible.

-If possible, I will notify the copyright holder of my use.

Above all, showing courtesy and respect to the copyright holder will go a long way to smoothing over any issues that may arise. That’s how I handle this issue.