After a friend of mine told me that I had no contact information on my photos, I realized that I didn't have an excplicit copyright notice either. So, after some thought, I've decided to make all of my photographs available under the Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike license, for the following reasons:
I wanted something inbetween the far-too-restrictive "all rights reserved" of standard copyright terms and the "no rights whatsoever" of placing it in the public domain immediately.
Come on, it's my photography. Give credit where credit is due, m'kay? (And flames where flames are due..)
This is how I define commercial use: If someone is going to make money off of my work, then I should receive a share of that money, or otherwise give permission. It's as simple as that.
If you use my work as a basis for something else, then that new work should not have additional restrictions placed upon it. This is similar in spirit to the GNU GPL for software, and it is there to ensure that what enters the commons stays in the commons.
I've chosen this as the minimum set of uses I'm completely okay with, and while it may seem somewhat restrictive, it's a lot less restrictive than the default "all rights reserved" that would otherwise apply. This CC license is just the default terms I offer, and if you stick with them then not only am I giving you full permission to use my stuff, I can't stop you, unless of course you violate the terms in some way.
As I already mentioned, if you want to negotiate different terms, all you'll have to do is ask. I'll probably say yes.
Meanwhile, a slight change of subject.
There have been many recent articles about how "Non-Commercial" licenses are considered harmful. I'm having a hard time figuring out just who is being harmed, especially when compared to standard all-rights-reserved copyright -- They keep forgetting that the default rule under US copyright law is that in order to use my creative works for much of anything [1], you'll have to ask the author's permission.
By and large, the only restriction I really care about is attribution, and I'm even willing to waive that depending on the circumstances.
The Non-Commercial clause is rather heavy-handed, but I don't know of a better way to keep unscrupulous people from taking advantage of me. Again, you'll have to ask for different terms.
Copyright is supposed to be a compromise; guarantee authors a limited period of exclusive benefit from their work, in exchange for putting it in the public domain after that period is up. In my opinion, the real problem with current copyright law is that terms are ridiculously long; so long in fact that they are effectively infinite. Thank you, Disney.[2]
I'm debating adding a general "Once X years have passed since its creation, I place my work in the public domain." clause, with 28 [3] years being the likely value of X. H
[1] Fair use notwithstanding, but "commercial use" is hardly "fair use"
[2] Disney took many stories whose copyrights had expired, and created new works based on them. They then manipulated copyright laws, getting them extended again and again, such that that nothing they created would ever fall into the public domain, ensuring that nobody could ever use their work as a basis for something new, thus never doing to Disney what they did to the Brothers Grimm, for example.
[3] The original term of copyright in the US was 14 years, renewable for another 14-year term. The current term of "author's life plus 70 years" is complete bullshit..
Yes, it's been a while. Yes, things are still going on in my life. No, I don't particularly care about keeping this thing updated, as I generally have better things to do with my time. That said, expect another update soon. Huzzah.