updating articles

The last few days I have just been updating old article on my photo tips website. Unfortunately when I say 'updating', I just mean changing the images to be hosted on the same server as the site, rather than Flickr, and adding the required Creative Commons licence info below each image. I haven't really been updating the text of the articles at all, despite some needing it.

And I have only only done a small number of the articles so far, I still have a lot more to go. But it really needs to be done as currently quite a few of the articles have missing images where the Flickr user has deleted the image or their account. When I've changed all the articles to use locally hosted copies of the images, then at least I won't have that problem again in the future.

Part of the Creative Commons licence is that you must state / provide a link to the licence terms when using a CC licensed image. From Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) (emphasis mine):

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

This is not something obvious you think of when using a CC licensed image. You just tend to think of making sure that you credit the author. I wasn't aware of it for a quite a while, and so a lot of the older blog posts are featuring CC licensed images with credit to the author, but no link to or mention of the CC licence type.

Technically, these images are not complying with the terms of the CC licence. And so I could be sued for copyright infringement since the image use is not licensed.

So getting this corrected is quite important to me, especially since the blog is aimed at other photographers. It should be showing that I fully respect the rights of other photographers, and use their images correctly as per the licence terms.

Where possible I am also replacing CC non commercial licensed images with ones that do allow commercial use. I am not quite so bothered about this. The argument for only using images that allow commercial usage in the licence terms is that the blog has ads on it. In my mind, this is not commercial use. Commercial use to me means selling something that includes the image. Non Commercial use is a different thing to personal use only as far as I am concerned.

But there are some that feel otherwise. And the Creative Commons licence is not clear as to what exactly is deemed as non commercial. So it is better safe than sorry. As I said though, I am not too bothered about it. The probability of being sued over it is practically nill and the probability of being sued and loosing is even less.

I am just switching out non-commercially licensed images for ones that do allow commercial usage where practical. In some cases I can't find a suitable replacement for a non-commercial licensed image, and so I just stick with the non-commercial licensed image.

In terms of today, most of the day was spent doing my website stats checking. I wish Google would fix googlebot as it's so annoying having to sift through all the stupid made up and malformed requests it generates to find valid requests that may be generating an error. And of course all those requests from hackerbots trying to find vulnerabilities by looking for certain files are annoying as well.