CC Chairman, Joichi Ito, conducted two “practical workshops” at the iSummit on using the CC license for videographers and photographers. Each workshop had 20-30 participants from almost as many countries and proved to be an exciting opportunity for professionals and amateurs alike to share their experiences with using the CC license for their work.

During the discussions at the workshops, one key obstacle emerged that limits the wider usage of the CC license specifically by professional videographers and photographers and institutional users such as universities, NGOs or businesses: the lack of availability of model release forms compatible with CC licenses.

While the CC licenses have been adapted to dozens of languages and the specific legal norms of numerous countries, model release forms—the authorizations that people appearing in photos or video must sign for the videos to be commercially usable in the United States as well as other countries—are currently not available in any official form via the CC website.

Ito pointed out in the workshop that “giving the right to somebody [to publish a subject’s image] is different from giving someone the right to give other people the right.” While Ito placed an emphasis during the workshop on the fact that considering not just the formal legal side of publishing someone’s photo, but also the ethical, was very important—although he does not collect signed release forms for his CC-BY photos published on Flickr, as a rule, he doesn’t publish unflattering photos of people. Stating that “the CC license will not cure cancer,” he told the workshop participants that CC license-users may be taking significant risks when they publish their photos and that at this point, the best that can be done is to ensure that people understand the risks that they are taking.

Unfortunately, for institutional or professional CC users, particularly those wishing for their work to be shared, remixed and/or published commercially in hyper-litigious nations such as the US, the simple knowledge that placing a CC license on their work may entail more risks than a traditional copyright may be reason enough to avoid the license.

In order to overcome this obstacle, it will be necessary for CC legal teams to make clear to would-be licensors exactly what form of authorization must be acquired from the subjects in their videos in order for their work to be licensed under CC licenses. While it will arguably be impossible to eliminate all risks involved with broadcasting any image or video, if CC wants to grow beyond its present user base into the aforementioned arenas, such legal work will be necessary.

It is important to note that Ito did emphasize that a CC license does not imply that the licensor does have permission from subjects to be published—it only covers the copyright involved in the act of capturing the image. However, since the point of CC licensing is ostensibly that others be able to reuse one’s work without worry that a large investment in a remix or a distribution of a CC piece would be met with a legal injunction from an unauthorized subject that would force the piece to be taken off the web, off the air, re-edited, or recalled. While the possibility of a re-publisher being forced to pay damages in court may be small, the threat of the loss of the investment in the work is more than enough to warrant further work on this issue.

Beyond model releases, in commercial TV or film production in the United States, a series of other clearance forms are frequently required, and if such forms are not collected by a would-be re-publisher of CC-BY content in a commercial work, they will likely be prohibited from even submitting the piece to film festivals or TV broadcasters. Specifically, location releases for shots taken on private property, music releases for audio featured in a video piece, and non-remuneration waivers from crew members may be required. In the case of video or photo work conducted with illiterate subjects (or in the case of some commercial movies, cf. “Girls Gone Wild), a script is often read to a subject and the consent to the terms are recorded on video in order to acquire authorization.

Without clear guidelines and a version of these authorizations being made available publicly in multiple languages to the CC-community, it is likely that republications or remixes of CC-BY work—though published with the intent of being as widely distributed as possible—will not be making it to a commercial TV channel or to a theater near you any time soon.

tags: Dubrovnik Croatia media-events model-release summit07 videography photography workshop

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