Tag: licence

Upsplash free photos but at what cost?

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

I love good photos and especially like them when they are creative commons so I can attribute the original author. I tend to use Flickr which I have contributed to a lot because you can easily search across all the creative commons photos using this search link.  Recently I came across unsplash and I was impressed and when I saw free and decided nope read that licence. Had a read and started using the photos with attribution in my blog and slides.

Recently I was alerted to the fact unsplash use to apply a creative common licence originally then changed them all to their own licence.

From wikipedia…

Before June 2017, photos uploaded to Unsplash were made available under the Creative Commons zero license, which is a public domain equivalent license and a waiver, which allowed individuals to freely reuse, repurpose and remix photos for their own projects. This was changed in June 2017, and photos are now made available under the Unsplash copyright license, which imposes some additional restrictions

What are these additional restrictions?

The Unsplash license prevents users from using photos from Unsplash in a similar or competing service. While it gives downloaders the right to “copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, including commercial purposes, without asking permission from or providing attribution to the photographer or Unsplash” the Unsplash terms of service prohibit selling unaltered copies, including selling the photos as prints or printed on physical goods.

Before June 2017, Unsplash photos were covered by the Creative Commons zero license.

That sucks to be frank, feels like a platform play and although they now have the dataset on github for research purposes…  Its seems the creative commons zero marked metadata is gone forever?

Digital licence woes and problems ripped large

https://www.flickr.com/photos/will-lion/2593488374/i

Digital licensing and ownership has been discussed in the past a lot, back then it was therotical. But its interesting to revisit the discussion in more modern times with the new ecosystems which have become common place.

Ok fair enough it’s from Torrentfreak but still interesting a read.

The digital world has made it much easier to buy and consume entertainment.

Whether it’s a movie, music track, or book, a shiny “buy now” button is usually just a few keystrokes away.

Millions of people have now replaced their physical media collections for digital ones, often stored in the cloud. While that can be rather convenient, it comes with restrictions that are unheard of offline.

This is best illustrated by an analogy I read a few years ago in a research paper by Aaron Perzanowski and Chris Jay Hoofnagle, titled: “What We Buy When We Buy Now.”

Blip.tv does good on its promise to archive

Mike Hudack of Blip.tv

A long while ago I talked about why I used Blip.TV over Youtube, Vimeo and other video uploading sites.

  • Upload video of any length
  • Download the archived original
  • Use there non branded flash player anywhere you like
  • Add a creative commons licence
  • Automatically add content to Internet Archive
  • Add advertising to your video (start or end)
  • Add alternative formats of the same clip

Although most of these features are now supported by the others, blip.tv was promising this in 2006!

It was a shame last year when I saw the message in my email saying blip.tv was removing my videos. I did try and download most of them, but remembered the promise of uploading everything to archive.org.

…If Blip.tv ever pulled a Yahoo/Flickr thing on its users. You could pipe them all to Archive.org and remove them from Blip. Metadata and all..

Well they didn’t exactly do a Yahoo/Flickr thing on us, but their business models changed when they got bought. But they nicely honoured their word and dumped everything requested on to archive.org. I was having a hard time finding stuff (archive.org’s search isn’t the best) but I found everything using this search. Including classics like Mike Arrington thinks the BBC should be dissolved. Remember the firestorm which came from that video and his lack of ignorant comment. Finally it was followed by this.

The only disappointment is the links around the web are now broken as redirection of blip links never happened… Maybe I should contact mike (if he’s still in CEO) to remind him, wonder if he remembers me?

Dataportability for the win…!

Here is a summary of what happened with Blip.tv in full

Go on demand?

Webuser says Don't renew your TV Licence

I saw this while waiting in line at Booths today… and thought

The cord cutting group think is starting to take root… Of course i’d advise against it 🙂

Interesting to see the whole cord cutting thing is starting to come out into the mainstream.

As an early adopter this isn’t really news and many years ago I was doing this but of course paying the TV Licence. Because of the TV licence covers more than just the TV. Regardless, at least 90% of the media I watch on my TV screen is on demand. Live content is rare and if it is, its the backchannel of twitter which encourages me to even think about going for live media.

Facebook for my old crusty photo collections

Me and the wowball

Most people know how much I really hate Facebook, although in the last few months I’ve slightly warmed to it for certain things.

Recently I scanned all my old negatives into jpgs, and I’m not sure what to do with them?

Normally I would upload them to Flickr.com like most of my photos but to be honest I only upload the best of my shots to flickr.com (even though I have a pro account and I have done for the last 4+ years). It just didn’t make sense to upload the old crusty scanned pictures to flickr.com. So I had a think and decided that the best place to publicly put them is on Facebook. Yes the EULA still really bugs me and It probably means Facebook now owns my photos but heck, there so old and crusty, that I don’t really care. Better online somewhere that lost in negative form forever?

On the upside, most of the photos are from when I was in school, so most of the people in the photos will be on facebook too. This means they can tag the photos to death and write stupid comments which make youtube comments look like degree essays in comparison. Oh and of course there will be the crazy (its taking over the web like crazy) "I like this" button for those who can’t be bother to say anything meaningful… (Geez I’m so snotty about facebook, I should really stop being so darn negative about it)

I also reckon theres roughly about 300 of them once you take out some of the duplicates (I did the scanning over a few days and didn’t really do a good job of splitting the done and to do piles, so shoot me). No one really wants to see my photostream full of old crusty photos for almost 300 photos… Heck not even I want to see that. So I’ll use facebook as I’ve been using it previously, a massive dumping ground for publicly available data. I’ve marked the photos as public, so it will be interesting to see what that means in the great scheme of things.

I’m aware there is some facebook event later today but I doubt its anything which will change my view on facebook or using it.

So old friends of mine, do check out the tip of the iceberg collection i’ve uploaded so far under school days (I was tempted to write skool daze but I don’t want to encourage the super lameness which comes with facebook stuff). I’ll upload the rest once Facebook stops telling me to update my flash player or I can be bothered to deal with the crappy html uploader.

Oh yeah I’m aware that this does get fed into facebook via rss. So no offense meant to my lovely facebook friends… Actually screw it. Isn’t all this so AOL 2.0???? What did you all think about me making it public instead of just my little network? Whooo the public Internet is so scary 🙂