Hacker Wednesday 8/25 – Illustrations Licensed!
- August 26th, 2010
- By rdcHQ
Oceana chose her license at #rdcHQ yesterday – she selected a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, and we walked through the procedure of registering a work at the Creative Commons website. The illustrations that she created will be available for download here – we are still putting some finishing touches on them at #rdcHQ, and exporting them for both web and print use.
The question regarding moral rights and licenses was posed to the group – what if someone disregards the chosen license and uses Oceana’s hard work without attribution, or sharing-alike? Artist networks are an important part of what makes the web work, and most creative people want to do the right thing and respect an artist’s wishes so the web remains a vital creative space. Education is a key component of this, and teaching people about the licenses and how to properly use them is important. If a license is not honored, generally an email to the source can correct the problem. Alternatively, many artists use mailing lists and social networks to ensure that artistic copyrights are not abused.
With that said, it would be wonderful to see a registry like Creative Commons go to the next level of development when it comes to registering works. In addition to being a repository for license deeds, it would be infinitely more useful if it could track usage of a particular work across the web. This could be achieved using a unique identifier and trackback system (source URLs automatically provide a unique identifier when a work is registered). A comment system could give the community a mechanism to report cool sightings of the work on the web or potential license violations. Systems like this are already becoming commonplace on other social networks – it would be wonderful to see one put to a practical use such as copyright (or, more importantly, “name attribution”)!