Recently, photographs of mine were used for ambiguous commercial purposes without permission. They were used for a university prospectus. With universities transforming more and more into Big corporations, I am on the one hand cynical about the indiscriminate use of pretty pictures to sell university degrees as commodities, especially when the images in question bear little direct relation to what is being offered. On the other hand, I live in hope that at some point soon universities with their student body will grow out of its contractor-client relationship and return to something that resembles the shared experiencial aquisition of wisdom from student and scholar alike, with the university authorities acting more like an alma mater than Chief Executive. And so images like mine, that were made for research - to understand more about the thing that was photographed - will become symbolic of the university’s desire to attract keen scholars to the institution. But I digress.
All this business with my photographs got me thinking and I was led to read about Creative Commons, a new licencing initiative that seeks to right the many idiocies surrounding the interpretation, misunderstanding and fear of copyright and reproduction law and encourage a respectful culture of sharing creative work. It puts the author, photographer, artist, composer, etc, back in charge of his/her work and on his/her terms in a non-defensive fashion. This is the kind of enlightened thing I would expect to eminate from a university but I suspect like so many other good things that are emerging, some clever and thoughtful people just decided to ‘do it’. So, from now and forever for all photographs, texts, artworks, music or any other original work created by me, shall be governed by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. This license will apply equally to future works and retrospectively.
