This blog has been pretty quiet lately — our apologies (or maybe “you’re welcome”…take your pick).
Last week was “Copyright Week“, at least according to some; despite being late to the party, we wanted to say thanks to JD Hancock for thanking us for our editing and re-using his photo. For free. Without asking.
We didn’t have to ask, of course, because we already had JD’s permission to use the photo, thanks to Creative Commons licensing. Still, it’s unusual to get thanks from a photographer, and probably just as unusual for the photographers that make the Web more appealing to get more than a cursory attribution at the bottom of a post. JD, thank you — it was the perfect photo, and we’re happy that you made and shared it.
It turns out that JD has a Tumblr blog to display his work and thank those who benefit from it. And if he hadn’t hit us up on Twitter, we never would have seen these, either:
(Images “The Lost Doctor“, “Always in Motion Is The Future“, “Pretty Penny” by JD Hancock (Flickr) – all CC BY 2.0)
In a Web full of stolen content, it’s probably refreshing for a photographer to get credit for his work. In a Web full of ambiguously-licensed content, it’s refreshing for us to get clear permission to re-use that work.
Thanks again to JD Hancock for his generosity and graciousness, thanks to all the creators whose work has graced our blog, thanks to Flickr for making it easy for people to share their work under license, thanks to Photo Pin (see post) for creating a great discovery and attribution tool, and thanks to Creative Commons (as always) for making so much of what we do possible.