Hi,
I am somewhat befuddled by the Creative Commons licenses.

http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses

I was thinking of allowing use, with restrictions, but I can’t find one which fits. I know some people here are exponents of the Creative Commons license, but so far it seems to give much away without any real benefit for me.

For example, I can let people use the image for free for commercial purposes. I feel that if someone is using my image to make money, I am right in charging a fee for its use. I can’t see a Creative Commons license with that form of attribution.

I also can’t see how I can control how the images will be used - I may want to restrict my work based on my own personal ethics. I would not want a picture of mine used by the BNP, or used to advertise products I am not comfortable with.

So, right this moment, my images are not licensed using the Creative Commons.

Yes, I am aware of the whole “if you don’t want them used, don’t put them on the web” argument. If I do find that someone has used an image without permission, I do have more weight behind my argument at the moment.

What do the group think about Creative Commons?

My photos are © to me. I'm going to start sticking a big watermark in the middle of them too because I find the copyright watermark that Lightroom imprints on the images to be insufficient for my liking.

Mark

So it’s not just me feeling protective then.

Although not really much use to you, the LR2/mogrify export plugin allows much more control over watermarking and the like.

Edd

All my stuff is © as well and all my images are watermarked. I thought long and hard about whether to have a whopping big watermark on my images or something more discreet. In the end I settled on one that's visible even in small versions of my images but that doesn't get in the way (I hope) of people's enjoyment of my pics, which is really why I'm posting them on Flickr anyway.

I want people to see my pictures. Hell, if I made some money out of them, I’d be happy - but it’s good to show work off. No offers of exhibition space, etc. so far, but that‘s to be expected.

I am generally open to requests from others to use my work - but I like to be the arbiter of this - I like to know where and how the pictures are going to be used. Partly because I am a mercenary, but partly because I like to keep track of it all.

I’m not sure if I want to watermark them though. I don’t want to obstruct the view too much. I try to keep the sizes on Fickr and my www.paulscrapbook.com site fairly small, so they have limited use. There is a fine line between being useful and being visible. If someone really wanted to use an image legitimately, they’d get the best quality version of that file as possible for that use, but that would come from me directly.