For some time now I have been going through a transformation in my understanding and acceptance of Creative Commons licensing.  In the past few months I’ve been absorbing much of the work produced by Cory Doctorow, specifically his essays collected together in Content, which is fantastic and a recommended read for anyone who produces anything from software to photography.  You’ll gain a real understanding the difference between copyright and licensing as well as learning a lot about DRM.  I should also offer credit to Craig, a good friend of mine, who has been a big flag waver for open source and Creative Commons for some time.  I finally got re-educated buddy ;0)

I’ve always been a fan of open source, and have been aware of Creative Commons for many years but only recently have the grey cells aligned to reveal an understanding of the difference between licensing your work and copyright.  A real ‘light bulb moment’ as people seem to say.

So, from today ALL of my photographic work will be available on Flickr licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.  In short this gives anyone the right to download and share or remix any of my photographs on condition that you attribute the original work to me, it is for non-commercial use and you share the resulting work under the same license.

Am I mad?  possibly, but I’m convinced this is the right move in the next stage of my personal journey into photography.  I’m not giving my copyright way I’m just licensing the work for others to use and  I’m looking forward to seeing if anyone takes up the opportunity and remixes any of my work, I sure hope they do.