So, it’s no secret that I lead a dual life–by day I’m the (not-so-) mild-mannered Roberts webmaster and head blogger. By night, I’m a practicing artist who’s probably slowly dying of some OMS-inhalation-related thing and almost certainly not getting my damage deposit back. So, the licensing of artistic works is something I’m concerned about a great deal off the clock, and for a lot of you I’m sure it’s something you worry about on the clock. I mean, cameras are used to make photography, yeah?

So, DPS has a short article about a service I actual use myself, called Creative Commons. Creative Commons gets thought of a lot as a sort of open-ride for people, signing away your commercial rights. And that’s not true. Sure, you can do that with Creative Commons, but you can not do that with them as well. CC works by asking if you want to allow commercial use, and then how you want to handle attribution. That’s pretty simple.

In the article, the author–Chris Folsom–says this little nugget, which I’ve been telling to friends, clients, and anyone who’ll listen for years:

Honestly, I don’t believe any licensing mechanism will keep people from stealing your images. If a photo is available to view on the internet, someone may use it regardless of whether you reserve all rights on the photo or not. Licensing your works under Creative Commons does not make it any easier or harder to infringe on your copyright.

And he’s pretty much right. I also don’t recommend watermarking images because people are going to use it anyway and a lot of reviewing professionals don’t want the image interrupted with your branding (I believe A Photo Editor has complained about this before). In the United States, artistic works belong to you the moment you make them anyway (for more details on the legal whatsits of that statement, and to find out how exactly it does work with cited statutes and not just ‘I’ve heard…”, go here: http://www.artlawteam.com/2009/09/articles/copyright-2/copyright-myths-debunked/ (if clicking that links gives you an error, highlight it, copy it, and paste it into your URL bar, their blog is having issues right now, but that’ll work).

So, CC s worth looking into, and Chris’ article below is a good intro. Give it a look, if you haven’t yet handled how you license your work.