Open Thinkering

Creative Commons licenses are irrevocable

• Technology, Creative Commons, photography
A slightly blurry black and white photo of a person wearing Creative Commons stickers over their sunglasses

A couple of weeks ago, a company specialising in the “global enforcement of image rights” got in touch demanding payment on behalf of their client.

The link they gave pointed to a weeknote from 2017 where I’d referenced a Creative Commons-licensed image I’d found on Flickr. They wanted payment of a few hundred pounds sterling.

Now, as anyone who has spent time looking at Creative Commons licensing knows, these kinds of licenses are irrevocable. That means that if you subsequently change the license — in this case from CC BY to Copyright (All Rights Reserved) — you can’t turn around and demand compensation from everyone who has used it.

This is confirmed in one of the modules for the Creative Commons Certificate for Educators, Academic Librarians, and Open Culture:

Irrevocable means a legal agreement that cannot be canceled. That means once you apply a CC license to a work, the CC license applies to the work until the copyright on the work expires. This aspect of CC licensing is highly desirable from the perspective of reusers because they have confidence knowing the creator can’t arbitrarily pull back the rights granted them under the CC license.

In the ~20 years I’ve had this blog, I’ve written over 2,500 posts. Let’s say I’ve used a CC-licensed image on fifth of those. If CC licenses weren’t irrevocable that’s hundreds of images about which I would somehow have to keep-to-date with regards to their license status. Which is, of course, ridiculous.

Thankfully, Flickr, the website from which I took the image, has a handy feature that allows you to see the license history of an image:

Screenshot of Flickr license history showing that the license was changed on January 6, 2018 from CC BY 2.0 license to the current Copyright (All Rights Reserved)

I changed the weeknote image in any case, just because it was eight years ago, nobody’s going to read it, and if a photographer really doesn’t want their photographs used, then I’m not going to argue.

But I’m sure as hell not going to be stumping up any cash to the company involved — especially as I’ve got proof that, at the time I used it, the photograph was openly licensed.

Image CC BY-NC-SA A. Diez Herrero