Creative Commons
I recently was looking for Creative Commons images to put into some of my Nephilim Song stuff. This seemed like a perfect use for such work, I was producing freely distributed game supplements that had no budget and would be greatly enhanced with some images to break up walls of text and my art skills are limited at best.
One of the places I went looking for images was Deviant Art since they have a proper Creative Commons tag easily searchable using a google site search if not their built in search. What surprised me is the number of times I encountered something to the effect of:
Licensed under the Creative Commons attribution non-commercial license. You can not use my work ANYWHERE without my express written permission and if you do, you are a thief.
I also encountered something along the lines of:
This work protected by copyright and creative commons.
This led me to believe that a sizable part of the Deviant Art community that was releasing works under the creative commons license, simply didn’t know what they were doing.
My understanding without being a lawyer is that the creative commons licenses are just that licenses, not protections. When you license your work under creative commons you are giving your express written permission for your work to be used without further consultation under limited conditions laid out in the specific creative commons license.
The creative commons license does not offer any additional protections above straight copyright, in fact it is a formal release of some those rights so your work can be used by the culture. There are very good reasons for doing this, it is only with a rich public exchange that we stand on the shoulders of giants.
If you do not wish to participate in that exchange, I do not wish to use your work without your blessing which is why I found the mislabeling so distressing. Some people made it obvious despite releasing their work under the creative commons that they did not wish for others to use their works, others made it clear that they did wish for others to be able to build new things using their work as a building block.
The ones in between worry me. They licensed the work, but my survey doesn’t fill me with confidence that they knew what they were doing.
I messaged a few of the artists who’s comments made it clear they did not wish to license their work and tried to inform them of what the license meant and I wrote this trying to further the educate the Internet.