Cristiano on Tech/Life

Last week a few people pointed me to this news item on the BBC news site about the London Girl Geek Dinners. I love the Girl Geek Dinners and the BBC, but was amazed to see my photos accompanied with the news item without any mention of my name. This is surprising because my photos are licensed under a Creative Commons “attribution” license.

After a few tweets and an email to some people at the BBC, the BBC told me that they did attribute to my photo in the ALT tag of the photo. Soon realizing that this might have been a bit of a relaxed implementation of attribution they quickly added my name under the photos.

I though that this was where this story ended until this morning Paul Downey wrote an interesting article “On The Vanity of Demanding Attribution”. He has some interesting views on the CC licenses, photographers requiring attribution, and the reasons we ask for attribution. I found his article interesting and added an extensive comment on my view of the situation. The main gist of my comment was that if the BBC had asked to use my photos without attribution, I would probably have let them.

I came to the conclusion that for most people, attribution has two sides: an external ego building factor that brings you link traffic and better Google rankings, and an internal ego factor that says you want to know what happened to your photos.

In my case I put the attribution license with my photos because this is the “common denominator” license that fits with most people using my photos. This does not mean that I’m not open to give a different license when requested. In the end though I want know that someone used my photos, no matter what. Not so I can keep control, but simply because I want to know. Notification for the sake of internal ego pleasing, not external.

So maybe there is a place for a CC license that requires notification, not attribution. We could maybe link Flickr up with some trackback system to make this easier, who knows. I hope that in the future people will read my Flickr profile page before using my photos as it really clearly states how I think an attribution should be done.

• Paul Downey :: On The Vanity of Demanding Attribution – PSD has a nice article on the vanity of demanding attribution for your work. It includes some references to my "problem" with the BBC last week when they published my photos without any proper attribution. I left an interesting comment that sparked some new ideas.
• BBC NEWS | Technology | Girls geek out over dinner – BBC article about the Girl Geek Dinners. Includes two photos by me! They forgot the attribution though. Hope they fix it soon.
• Travis Lopes – Website Designer & Developer – Interesting little manual on how to download the CS4 trial from the Adobe website. Password to the page is "msjstw"
• Apple fires back at Microsoft Windows campaign | 9 to 5 Mac – The new I'm a Mac ad is pretty good.
• XKCD Cartoon-Off – Great little article by the New Yorker where the author is having a cartoon-off with the creator of the XKCD comic