User:Mike Peel/Commons reuse
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This is a draft blog post. Please feel free to edit this page! |
What happens when you release photos on Wikimedia Commons?
I have been making my photographs available on Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons licence since 2006. Over the years I have uploaded over 3,000 photos to Commons, and I plan to upload many thousands more in the future. The main reason I started uploading my photos was to illustrate Wikipedia articles, and that's still a big reason why I have continued doing so. However, only 15% of the images I've uploaded are currently used on the Wikimedia projects. So, why do I continue uploading so many images?
In the long run, I hope that my photos will help preserve history - providing a record of the state of things today with the hope that they will prove useful to others in the future. However, there have also been a number of great shorter-term outcomes: namely, people making use of my photos in ways I never anticipated when uploading them.
In December 2007 I took a photo of the London Eye; I uploaded it to Commons a month later. I was taken aback in August 2008 when I got an email out of the blue from a couple who had recently gotten engaged on the London Eye - they'd found my photo and loved it so much that they had it printed on canvas. Due to a mistake by the delivery company, they accidentally received two copies of it - so they got in touch with me and sent me the extra copy! To this day this print acts as a focal point for my flat.
At Science Online London 2011, which took place at the British Library, I took a photo of Michael Nielsen. The photo was subsequently published by the New York Times.
More recently, I was contacted by Nature Cymru who wanted to let me know that they had used one of my photos in their latest edition - a picture of seagulls nesting in Conwy Castle. I uploaded this photo as part of a series of photos I took of Conwy Castle, and this was the photo I expected to be of least use - but it turned out to be the first of this set of photos to be reused.
One of the lessons I've learnt throughout this is that, realistically, no-one respects the licence that your photo is licensed under - they'll simply use it for their purposes. If you try to keep full copyright of your photo and deny people the use of the image, then you'll be ignored - but if you release it under a free license then you'll be able to ask for proper attribution.