CogDogBlog » creative commons

Beyond Linktribution is Thanktribution

Alan Levine aka CogDog — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 18:25:30 +0000

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by vistamommy

A few clicks back I coined the made up term “linktribution” to represent the recommended way of thanking someone for use of their open licensed content by linking back to the original. It is the least one can do, eh?

Sadly it does not happen nearly enough, note this article on Psychology Today — not only does it have an image (probably not licensed from the movie Stand By Me as this TinEye search reveals for the image), it just sits there w/o out any kind of attribution at all.

But I go off track.

Doing a link back, again, is the base minimum that one ought to to, but there is no reason not to go a step farther. I cannot seem to locate it in my blog (uh oh), but I remember writing once about the phenomena of people emailing asking for permission to use say, a flickr photo. I used to think I needed to educate them, that creative commons meant they did not need to ask permission… but reflecting on that, I like that they contact me, as I might have never known of the use of a photo.

So going beyond linking your attribution, is actually letting someone know they used your stuff. I admit I do not do nearly enough of this, especially as I use in almost every blog post a flickr creative commons photo. This act by itself is small, but to me, adds to the potential for increased positive serendipity of discovery.

And it just happened to me today.

On a photo of mine of a sliced loaf of home made bread came this comment:

I see some of these trickle in every now and then- someone letting me know they’ve used a photo of mine on a web page or blog post. Sometimes I check sometimes I don’t, but I was curious about the link in the comment to the Photographic Dictionary- what a cool idea!

Looking for a simple dictionary that references photos? Here it is:

The Simple Online Photographic dictionary is a personal pet project originally started as an illustrated dictionary on Giraffian. It was designed as a quick reference, born out of a frustration for finding what you want on Wikipedia without having to wade through very verbose pages, but with the alternative goal of being more informative than a plain text dictionary.

Text on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Almost all of the images on this site were sourced from flickr and were licensed under the Creative Commons-licensed content for commercial use, adaptation, modification or building upon at the time of sourcing. The balance of the images were either used with permission or were otherwise licensed to be used for derivative works at the time of sourcing.

This dictionary differs from other dictionaries in several ways:

Language that is simpler and easier to understand than sites like Wikipedia

Short, to the point definitions of words

Every entry illustrated by a photograph

All names are given for concepts or nouns that are known by a different name in different parts of the world.

You can use this dictionary for a variety of purposes:

As a tool to learn English with

As a children’s picture dictionary

As a teaching aid or home schooling resource

As a cross-cultural reference for quickly showing someone a visual representation of a word they don’t understand

As a writing inspiration

As a poetry resource for rhyming words

As a memory learning aid or memorization booster

And simply as a website to browse to look at the pictures!

Notice too that they also have a wish list for entries needing photos.

Now step back, and let me repeat. Under creative commons, RumpledElf could have used my photo without mentioning it to me… but because they did, I discovered something new, and now can share it.

Linktribution is the baseline, now let’s do more thanktribution… and I will start by next adding thanks to the photo I used at the top of this post.

Pay it forward, spread some link and thanks love around.

Dominoe’s Day on Flickr

Alan Levine aka CogDog — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:06:09 +0000

Thanks to Martin Weller, I was tipped off to today’s flickr blog theme as being D is for Dalmatian. Of course, given my favorite of favorite lost/found/lost/found dogs, I had to take a peek.

Interestingly, I spotted 53212 photos found by searching on “dalmatian” sorted by interestingness (well I did not actually count, I used the numbers at the bottom)

Of those, some 4515 are licensed creative commons- that is a whopping 8.5% of the total.

The road to openness and sharing is a long slow uphill climb. Or maybe I should try my “glass is already 8.5% full” attitude?

Among the few is “The Perfect Dog”

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by J. Chris Vaughan

And I knew one who was just as perfect to me–

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by George Ferris

It’s Not Really Sharing When the Default Is Not

Alan Levine aka CogDog — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 06:03:27 +0000

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Roberto Rizzato ►pix jockey◄ Facebook resident

Let’s stop politely nodding and play lip service to sharing content. Let’s stop doing sort of sharing, like sort of pregnant. You do or you don’t. And save the trotted our excuses, “most people don’t know about creative commons”, “the default is turned off”. It’s bull, lazy bull turds, and its time to turn it up way past 11.

Frankly, if all a site does is trot out creative commons like little stickers pasted on for decoration, its like one of those “save the planet” bumper stickers hanging on the bumper of a Hummer.

Look at all the great content on ITConversations, my favorite source for tech podcasts. Their content pages do not even indicate a creative commons license (example). If you lift the hood and peek at the source code, you can find however the RDF code for a cc license:

Their entire site is licensed with a Sampling 1.0 license…. which is “retired and not recommended”.

Are we serious about Creative Commons or not?

Did I chew up some rogue catnip today. You bet I did.

We are building a new technology resource at NMC (more on that in a week or so) and part of it is a library of media– and we are being strict about only listing content that is licensed for re-use or public domain (YouTube is a whole ‘nother story- can you believe they have no creative commons option? we are just linking to their policy page as a pseudo license).

Technically we are not housing any media- all of it is via reference/embeds/links to the source. But that’s not the issue.

The challenges have been first with content on Slideshare – as I call it “the YouTube for PowerPoints” and really is one of my favorite services. And while you can set a default license on your account, I have heard more than one person say it is not always obeyed.

Unlike flickr, there is no batch tool to revise your content (it is one by one). Don’t try to tell em its a technical issue. Its something akin in query language to

UPDATE `presentations` SET license="BY" WHERE user=$uid'

Or maybe there is a left join or two in there, but its not hard.

And while creative commons licenses are listed on content pages, there is no way to even search for re-use licensed content. The data is in their database (every presentation has a license set to it); why not expose it in the search? I was forced to crunch google queries by forcing results to come from slideshare.net and to exclude ones that had “All Rights Reserved” on the page:

Okay, I can deal with end arounds for a site that for some reason cannot search on the data on is own database. Am I nuts to want to be able to find content I know that I can share?

But what was more insane (before I had nailed down the google search above and I was getting more false positives) was the sheer number of Slideshare presentations that were listed as “©All Rights Reserved”. Ok I can accept that from maybe some of the corporate decks, but I was looking at ones from librarians, teachers, ed tech folks with the clamps locked down.

Like this one on Collective Intelligence and E-Learning 2.0, there is even on slide 18 topics of open access and open content, and even a little Creative Commons chart:

Yet on this presentation’s Slideshare page:

No lest you think I am tossing too much blame the author’s way (I’ll toss a little), it’s more the norm than not on Slideshare. Heck, if someone like Bryan Alexander who shares voraciously has presentations stamped “©all right reserved” then there is something wrong in the machine.

So here is the rub- if an online medis sharing site is about sharing (even includes it in tis name) and states its purpose as:

Individuals & organizations upload documents to SlideShare to share ideas, connect with others, and generate leads for their businesses.

then how can you start sharing when the default is set to the opposite? In the vein of Lessig’s Two Cultures discussion in Remix, Slideshare poses as a RW culture but starts you out as RO.

The counter is of course that with slideshare, even if the content is licensed “All Rights Reserved”, I can freely link to it, and even embed it in my own web page, so yes, the content is shared, though it really always resides at Slideshare. But I cannot unshackle the statement of sharing something stamped “All Rights Reserved.” Maybe I am harping over nothing.

In a little Twitter venting (thats what 140 characters are for) I had an interesting response with @kfasimpaur

And actually I think the opposite. I think the default should be open. If you set up an account on an internet hosted site devoted to sharing media, why is the default for private and protected? It makes no sense to me, and promotes a pandering to RO culture. Make the choice clear when you sign up, “Your new account is set up to share content under [insert menu] creative commons licensing because it is Groovy and the Right Thing to Do. If you do not want to share, then set your preference to Stingy”

This is opposed to what we have now, where when you set up accounts, the question is often not asked, and the setting is bured 3 levels deep in preferences.

Let’s stop tip toeing around being an open sharing online culture. Let’s make the default be RW. If not, then it’s just paying lip service. It just does not feel right

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Roberto Rizzato ►pix jockey◄ Facebook resident

Bye-bye flickr cc BY Hello BY-NC

Alan Levine aka CogDog — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 07:25:35 +0000

It was back in late 2006 I switched my flickr photo creative commons license to the simple, and sharable, by attribution license. I said then:

So I am considering, pondering, swaying that the most free, is the simple BY Attribution license, and until someone strongly can compel me backward, have switched this on my blog and my flickr collections.

I now have been strongly compelled, by Alec Corous’ recent post on Considering CC-Non Commercial. Alec does have a new Amazing Story where his video of him helping his daugher learn to ride a bicycle was found, and licensed by Nokia to be part of a new commercial.

Not just part- it is the crowning last segment in a montage, the one the closes the deal on the commercial’s message- check it our yourself http://stalkr.tv/Media/Nokia.mp4.

The thing is that his use of the BY-NC creative commons license (it can be used in any work if someone provides attributiona nd it is for non-commercial work.

The key here is that this license does not preven commercial use of Alec’s media- it just means someone wishing to gain from a commercial use, they have to seek permission from Alec (and likely compensate him, as what happened with his video). Again, if someone wants to use his video for monetary gain, they need to pay or get approval from the copyright holder; but for everyone else, they can still freely use it without needing to seek permissions.

As Stephen Downes notes in a comment ion Alec’s post

Basically, what the NC provision says is that, if they make money, I make money, and they they don’t make money, I don’t make money. Nice, reciprocal, and fair.

This is not about dreaming of profiteering from sales of my flickr media, and any dreams I have of that are most definitely a fantasy.

So I just flipped my default flickr license in past and future photos to BY-NC. One downside I have noted is that a frequent flickr contact who has harvested a number of my CC flickr photos for WikiPedia articles, tells me that Wikipedia will not accept BY-NC licensed photos. I cannot find the rationale, but I’m willing to flip an image back to BY when Pete asks.

Bye Bye BY!

You’d Think a Big Site Like GigaOM Would Be Better at Creative Commons

Alan Levine aka CogDog — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 07:20:58 +0000

cc licensed flickr photo shared by kisses are a better fate than wisdom

I’m just a little pup on the web. A one dog show. I’ve got no ads on my blog, no sponsors, no income here. I pay for everything myself.

But I sure as hell take the steps to provide attribution credit for images I use here. It’s the right thing to do. It’s the right behavior to model. It’s the golden rule. It’s easy.

Perhaps if you are an outfit like GigaOM you don’t have to bother with such trivial annoyances.

Tonight I came across their post on Open vs. Closed: In the Ongoing Battle Over Control, How Much Is Too Much? and right away I recognized the left side photo in the collage they used:

or you can find directly on their site at http://gigaom.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/open-vs-closed.jpg

I recognized that one right away as a creative commons one I’ve seen pop up on searches I have done before. Sure enough, one 15 second dip into CompFight, do a creative commons tag search on “road horizon clouds” and its the first one up– in fact here it is:

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Stuck in Customs

Wow, there I go attributing again. I cannot help it.

So I went back to the GigaOM article and scoured the post looking for credit. Nothing. No link, no text credit. This seems to be at odds over the BY NC SA license on the source flickr photo.

GigaOm has provided neither attribution nor is it sharing in a like manner. It would have been easier to find if I had used TinEye (AMAZING tool) :

The blue lock is more elusive- I could not locate it in TinEye or flickr. Who knows where it came from? Is it licensed? Was it found on Google Images? You cannot tell.

So maybe it was just an oversight. I’ve made bigger mistakes myself. I informally scanned 15 GigaOM posts and found maybe 60% did have an attribution at the bottom of the article. But quite a lot do not.

Maybe I am nitpicking, but if me as a solitary little blogger can manage to attribute every photo I use, I expect a little better from the big dogs.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by claudiogennari

I’m warning you, world, attribute like a good citizen, or be wary for a dog looking over your shoulder!

No Linked Attribution: When the CC Item Vanishes?

Alan Levine aka CogDog — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 04:21:43 +0000

I always provide links back to the source as attribution for the flickr creative commons photos I use. Today I ran into the not so surprising case of wondering what to do, and what the ramifications for, if the original is no longer there?

Here’s the case. A dark night in a web that knows how to keep its secrets, but one dog is still trying to find the answers to life’s persistent questions. Me.

Oops, wrong story.

I was working on a site which has a banner collage made of 5 or 6 flickr cc licensed images. When I did the original, I downloaded them in 500px size (I keep the original cryptic file names, like “196478990_e68fe3c25a.jpg”). I also, and I wish I could say always, kept a text file with the credits info.

In making a credits page on the new site, I reached for my favorite tool, yep, the one I did myself, the Flickr CC Attribution Helper for Greasemonkey – a Firefox script that nicely inserts two kinds of copiable attribution strings right in the flickr page (only if it is cc licensed):

Now frankly I think this is best thing since

cc licensed flickr photo shared by mattburns.co.uk

Look! I just used it! Again.

I digress.

So I was going to use this as my usual way of attribution for flickr cc content.

Except, one photo came up with the message at the top; I guess the owner of the flickr account skipped town and closed down the account. Or make up any other story. Got hit by a meteorite. Killed their account in protest of not getting enough attribution (I was late again!).

But I got thinking, what happens then to the right to use it if the original is gone? And what would I link to as attribution?

I tweeted before really thinking…

Plenty of people reminded me that it was there in the license (doh) the legal-verbiage-I-click-without-reading, section “7b Termination”

Subject to the above terms and conditions, the license granted here is perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright in the Work). Notwithstanding the above, Licensor reserves the right to release the Work under different license terms or to stop distributing the Work at any time; provided, however that any such election will not serve to withdraw this License (or any other license that has been, or is required to be, granted under the terms of this License), and this License will continue in full force and effect unless terminated as stated above.

So once something is released into Creative Commons, it is there forever under the terms you originally got it, even if the original goes away, or the owner changes their mind. The only “termination” is if the user (me) does something to breach the terms of the license, like using something commercially when it is NC (??) or making jokes about lawyers.

Or even more clearly, in the Creative commons FAQ:

What if I change my mind?
Creative Commons licenses are non-revocable. This means that you cannot stop someone, who has obtained your work under a Creative Commons license, from using the work according to that license. You can stop distributing your work under a Creative Commons license at any time you wish; but this will not withdraw any copies of your work that already exist under a Creative Commons license from circulation, be they verbatim copies, copies included in collective works and/or adaptations of your work. So you need to think carefully when choosing a Creative Commons license to make sure that you are happy for people to be using your work consistent with the terms of the license, even if you later stop distributing your work.

And an even bigger “doh” for me because I can still provide attribution by photo credit (in text) without doing a link back. I am so hunk up on links and linktribution that anything else feels weak.

So my original record keeping works, in those days, before my cool as bread Greasemonkey script, I would keep text file logs (which was tedious, about a 4 trip copy/paste routine from web page to text file)

2572694217_200b3646af.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/19353461@N04/2572694217/
scimanal

Where the first line is the file name I saved it, the second the link, and the third the flickr owner’s name.

So thanks “scimanal” for the photo, where-ever you are.

On a related front, as a number of people are hopping off of Firefox for Chrome, I’ll have to bone up on Chrome’s extensions. But, a neat discovery I found was a way to enable Greasemonkey Scripts in Safari- an opensource thing called Greasekit. It’s pretty easy, you first download a thingie called SIMBL.

You gotta love the geek cred behind this description:

Problem:
Some applications do about 90% of what I want.

Solution:
Develop my own applications.

Better Solution:
Patch the application myself…

SIMBL (SIMple Bundle Loader) – pronounced like “symbol” or “cymbal” – enables hacks and plugins. For instance, SIMBL enables PithHelmet to enhance Safari.

Wow, I am glad to have my PithHelmet!

Please ignore the diversion. Install SIMBL, its a small app that goes somewhere deep in the bowls of the computer. The download GreaseKit, more or less a small plug-in file that you bury about 7 folders deep in your home directory.

The next time you launch Safari, you have a Greasekit menu, where you can add Greasemonkey Scripts. I;ve not tried too many (well just mine, and it works):

Keep those attributions a goin’ Link if you can!

New! Improved! With Extra Sheen! Flickr CC Attribution Helper

Alan Levine aka CogDog — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 23:40:08 +0000

cc licensed flickr photo shared by jamelah

Mmm, sliced bread!

So far maybe 140 people have installed my Flickr Creative Commons Attribution Helper- a GreaseMonkey script for Firefox. I use the sucker almost every day.

It takes what used to be about a 5 click, 4 copy/paste operation to give me, in one motion, the HTML needed to embed a Creative Commons licensed flickr photo in my blog- and– the format is consistent every time.

But last week, a tweet from Alec Courous got me thinking, that there are times when you want an attribution string that is not HTML, e.g., when you are using flickr photos in say a presentation.

I took about 10 minutes to add that feature.

The new version 0.3 of my script at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/49395 now adds a second text box that has an attribution string in text:

Either box is automatically select when you click it, so it is just a command-c away from being used.

The one piece is that maybe you want your attribution done a different way- mine is formatted like:

cc licensed flickr photo by Zzzzzz Zzzzzzzzz: http://flickr.com/photos/xxxxx/ZZZZZZZZZ/

Hey, I had to choose something. If there is something better, please make suggestions, but you can also edit the script yourself! Just look under the Firefox Tools menu for Greasemonkey, then select Manage User Scripts. Select the script you want to edit… and click the Edit button (you may have to select a text editor; I use BBEdit Lite, but whatever you have for a plain text editor will do).

You will need to edit line 67, and it would help to know a bot of JavaScript for how it puts strings together:

// create content to insert to page
   div_attrib.innerHTML = '

CC Attribution (HTML)
<a title="' + phototitle + '" href="' + photolink + '"></a><br /><small><a title="' + phototitle + '" href="' + photolink + '">'  + 'cc licensed flickr photo</a> shared by <a href="' + userlink + '">' + usernick + '</a></small>
CC Attribution (text)
cc licensed flickr photo by ' + usernick + ': ' + photolink + '';

And it is the last part that is the text version. You could do something shorter like:

// create content to insert to page
   div_attrib.innerHTML = '

CC Attribution (HTML)
<a title="' + phototitle + '" href="' + photolink + '"></a><br /><small><a title="' + phototitle + '" href="' + photolink + '">'  + 'cc licensed flickr photo</a> shared by <a href="' + userlink + '">' + usernick + '</a></small>
CC Attribution (text)
cc licensed flickr photo: ' + photolink + '';

or longer like:

// create content to insert to page
   div_attrib.innerHTML = '

CC Attribution (HTML)
<a title="' + phototitle + '" href="' + photolink + '"></a><br /><small><a title="' + phototitle + '" href="' + photolink + '">'  + 'cc licensed flickr photo</a> shared by <a href="' + userlink + '">' + usernick + '</a></small>
CC Attribution (text)
creative commons licensed photo"' phototitle "'" by flickr user:' + usernick + ' found at ' + photolink + '';

Your mileage may vary.

So what do you think? This is way better than sliced bread! And its free!

Flickr CC Attribution Helper Greasemonkey Script

Alan Levine aka CogDog — Sun, 17 May 2009 18:21:46 +0000

This morning I drove down a new coding rode- I’ve never done a Greasemonkey script, so with some help poking around ones I have and Dive into Greasemonkey — here is my crude Flickr CC Attribution Helper.

What is does is adds a box on the right side of flickr photo pages — only for photos with a Creative Commons License — some HTML you can copy and paste for a blog post.

I found an existing script Flickr Photo Link but that was meant to grab the entire image URL (mine is meant for a caption assuming you have already inserted an image into a blog post or web page). Also, that 3 year old script did not even work because it was not parsing correctly for the user name the way it does the XPath search on the tag (looks like flick added a foaf attribute), but also, I did not like the way it stuck the code to copy in the comment text area which would get in the way of making comments.

But that script was a good start, and with a little bit of trial an error, I have the HTML being inserted in a text area on the sidebar. I have not yet mastered how to exactly place it using the flickr pages DOm structure, so it is hanging in the Tags content part. If someone better at GreaseMonkeying can help me move it say below the license area, I’d be a tali wagging coder.

And this is really set up for the way I write my photo links. I don;t just insert the image link from flickr; I download the image, upload to my blog, and then add after something like for say, this dreamy I’d like to be there now image:

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

or as displayed:

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

So in some sense, this is hardwired to the way I compose my attribution, although, it does not take too much to edit the script. I may add as a default the embed code for the image itself from flickr, since that is the way people likely use images anyhow (I like to have them on my own server).

I should also add some javascript that selects all the text when the mouse clicks in the box.

This is really just a crude first cut at this script, more to see if it is of use (and heck, I will use it if no one else does). Give it a try and let me know what it needs http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/49395

UPDATE: With help form Patrick, the 0.2 version of the script now is placed better in the flickr sidebar. I added to the HTML you get the link to display the image and link to the source photo, and added script so when you click in the field, the text is automatically selected for quick copying