Weird Week: When a Story Goes Viral!
And someone takes a pop at you
The past few weeks have been a whirlwind. I felt quite alarmed after finding out about potential problems with CC images. So I wrote an article on the topic, hoping people might tell me it was fine, a one off case, and I was worrying too much. But they didn’t.
The more I looked into it, the clearer it became that there’s a whole industry issuing legal demands for using creative commons images, mostly because people don’t follow the licencing rules — but it still made me very uncomfortable.
I wrote my assessment of the situation — a story that went viral and has now exceeded 6,000 views.
In the comments, someone highlighted a brilliant article by Cory Doctorow, relaying his experience working in the Creative Commons industry and later, getting a legal demand for a minor issue with one of the CC images he’d used!
I felt quite shaken by the revelations and resolved to use mostly my own photos going forward. I took my camera on a walk and started to build an image collection, specifically with Medium in mind!
It was quite fun!
Not everyone appreciated my stories
My articles on the subject did quite well. But not everyone was appreciative. I was accused of scaremongering by one lovely lady, who I’m sure was only looking out for people to be less stressed than me.
I even wondered if she was right.
But then a couple of people hopped into the comments to tell me it had happened to them. One chap settled on a $50 retrospective licencing fee, which was far lower than some of the figures I’d read about elsewhere… so perhaps the legal demands in at least some of these cases aren’t as crippling as I’d feared.
Another chap said he’d downloaded a picture from a CC site, supplied it to his publisher, and been told by his publisher that the person in the credits didn’t own the copyright to the work. I guess they didn’t use that one then.
I also later discovered an update to Cory’s story, showing that he’s standing up to repeated legal demands and challenging them — with a fair amount of success, I think.
A small but unknown risk
As my story took off on Medium, it was alarming for readers and for me. I didn’t want to upset anyone, but I felt it was important information. I wish I’d used more of my own photos from the start of my Medium journey!
As the reads grew in number, I wondered if I’d made a mountain out of a molehill. I didn’t want to cause unnecessary alarm.
I certainly felt that my own personal terror was disproportionate to the threat of this actually happening to me — my CC images are always fully credited, so they wouldn’t get me on that.
And if I innocently downloaded a CC photo that had been uploaded illegally, I like to think that most people are reasonable, and would not try to extort ridiculous sums of money from me.
But then I had a £1000 fine some years ago. So I guess that made the threat feel more real. My employer paid it then, but if I get another one, that’s for me.
Doubts about creative commons
Ever since these creative commons websites sprung up, I’ve had doubts about the wisdom of using them. I’ve always been concerned about the ownership of the images and what proportion are uploaded by the legitimate copyright owners.
But I used them on book covers for a few years, which gave me confidence.
Then my confidence was shaken. So in recent weeks, I’ve taken a step back, closed my fledgling publication which was giving me a headache, and changed a bunch of photos.
Now I feel more relaxed, thank goodness. I’m still using some Unsplash images, but I feel the risk is low.
These are my stories…
- This information Freaked Me Out!
- People are Being Sued for Using Creative Commons Images
- I Got a £1000 Demand For Using An Image Off The Internet
- What’s the Law on Embedding YouTube Videos in your Stories?
These are Cory’s stories…
- A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled a New Breed of Superpredator
- An Open Letter to Pixsy CEO Kain Jones, Who Keeps Sending Me Legal Threats
And here’s another take on the subject
