This was just another one of those stories where someone made use of one of my public domain flickr photos shared under CC0. If you follow the typical convention as taught in those woekshops, this means you can use an image, and not even need to give credit.
Just grab and go.
But that’s what a man named Thierry in Belgium did.
He not only took the photo from flickr, he took the time to contact me and offer thanks, letting me know he was using Felix’s photo on the web site for his product– dog treats made from insects and spent barely grain.
Yum.
Four years later, aka yesterday, Thierry contacted me again letting me know that after much effort and sweat, his business did not succeed, and he had left it in the hands of someone else. Why did he bother to do this? Why does one even have to ask, it’s a human thing to do.
And like originally when he contacted me, he offered to show me around “if I was ever in Belgium.”
This little story bounces in my mind after tuning in last week to the Creative Commons announcement od their new CC Signals framework/project as some means for content owners to “signal” their preference on how material is used by GenAI– a “new social contract.” It sounds virtuous and has nice icons.
I can’t say I see by any means what possibility there is for such reciprocity to happen, given the Big Guns have pretty much ridden the train of “we will hoover everything”. Doug Belshaw said pretty much more succinctly than what I might conjure.
To me, CC licenses were pretty much a preference signal though mostly the way I heard people talk about them was the idea that a license offered some kind of “protection” of their stuff. Slap on a CC BY-NC to stop commercial use.
So I still hear language of the idea that when people share, they have some expectation of such reciprocity. I have naively for my entire edtech career taken the other route- when I share, I expect nothing in return. No money. No credit. Hence most of my 70k flickr photos are CC0. That way, when I receive a thanks, or someone letting me know where/how the use my photos, it’s a bonus (and it happens a lot).
I don’t take photos to be compensated, so I do not even care if someone takes my photos and makes money. Heck, I have seen a few of ’em with a price sticker on Alamy. If some sucker pays for a photo they can get for free from my flickr account, well that’s nothing to me.
I have gotten more professionally and in just the kinds of connections from the Thierry’s on the internet that exceed anything I might have gotten by trying to project my stuff.
Yeah, I believe in the fairy tale kind of commons, laugh away at me.
I’m not here to take a side on CC Signals, I am not even sure enough what it is, and I will follow it with interest but am still not clear what can come from it.
Me, I will just keep foolishly giving away every single thing I have made and shared online. I don’t need to put out requests or have expectations for reciprocity, I prefer it when real people just do it because its the right thing to do. And I make all the efforts to extend reciprocity when I benefit from someone else’s work.
I’d rather be naive then greedy.
Featured Image: I’m Alone With My Big Thoughts flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Go ahead, take my photo! Use it w/o attribution! Sell ***** with it. Train your LLM with it. Have fun.
