Schmap and licensing

[schnee]

I recently got an email from Schmap indicating that they’d like put one of my images on a “short list” for possible use in a travel guide. First one of this that I’ve gotten.

I read much of the Flickr discussion of Schmap, but I’m curious about this community’s thoughts?

Does anyone here not reserve all rights to the images they post on-line?

[staplermofo]

It’s a @#*&ing conschpiracy!

/schtaplermofo

[zeke]

Does anyone here not reserve all rights to the images they post on-line?

In general and as a default, yes I’ve got all rights reserved. However there was one shot (“Screwing”, not even a good one) that someone supposedly wanted to include in a wikipedia article. Wikipedia’s licensing requires a share-and-share-alike license (or some other CC license), and thinking what the hell, I changed it.

I was a little suspicious the wikipedia bit was a ruse, so I was shocked, SHOCKED when they never told me where the wikipedia piece was. If someone wanted one of my shots that badly to ask me to change the license on it so they could steal it under false pretenses, a) its kinda cool and flattering that they’d want the shot that badly to go to that trouble, b) they could’ve just taken it and I’d never know anyways. Sure, it could have been someone from Black and Decker and I could have gotten hundreds and hundreds of cents for it, but…eh, I’m just happy someone liked it enough to ask.

[Elsinore]

I was a little suspicious the wikipedia bit was a ruse, so I was shocked, SHOCKED when they never told me where the wikipedia piece was. .

You didn’t look very hard, my dear:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wood_screw.jpg

As for schmap, I’ve gotten a request for a shot of mine taken of a statue at the St. Louis Zoo. However, I turned them down on the basis of not knowing the copyright status of the statue in the photo, and not being sure I had the right to license out a photo of it. The vast majority of my photos are all rights reserved, though I’m not at all opposed to fair use/photoshopping kind of things. I just would rather be asked first. I’m torn on the schmap thing, cause they’re selling a service and they’re getting off pretty cheap since they’re talking it up like it’s such an honor and good exposure for photographers to get their images in their database without being paid for it. To some extent, I’m down with that, but on the other hand, it seems like they could probably afford to throw some kind of bone to the photographers who are contributing (something like a free paid acct if they have different accounts, or some token payment…they’ve got ad revenue…). So yeah, I’m undecided about that kind of use…

[zeke]

😳 Yeah, well, a quick look at the history shows it was posted 2 months after the guy PM’d me in April. I never got another PM, and after looking on such pages, I wrote off the situation. So there! 😉

[sleeping]

I let Schmap use one of my images about 6 months ago. So far the view count on flickr is up to 19, so I’m not sure it’s much of a way to get exposure. I was in two minds about it to start with, and I’m not sure I’d let them use another.

I post all of my photos to Flickr under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license (but I don’t generally upload full resolution images, so this only applies to the medium-resolution version). That seems like a pretty fair compromise between letting people use stuff and protecting my rights.

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