I’ve been Schmapped!
Apr 3rd, 2008 by Molly
I’m a huge fan of the Creative Commons, and I promote their licenses and their work whenever I can. One of my current CC-related interests is in companies that build profit-making business models around the use of CC-licensed work. Jamendo distributes music for free to fans under a CC-NC license, and then sells commercial uses of those songs for film and advertising. I learned about Vidoop at South by Southwest; they offer an OpenID-based login system that relies on the identification of sets of image categories, instead of passwords (or something like that). Where does Vidoop get all the images it needs? Flickr’s CC-BY and CC-SA collections, of course.
The latest CC-based business to cross my radar is the travel guide site Schmap. I found out about it when I got a message that one of my Flickr photos had been nominated for inclusion in Schmap’s guide to the Niagara Region. I was glad that they liked my picture, and extra glad to learn about another cool project involving CC-licensed work.
Schmap creates free, printable and downloadable travel guides. As far as I can tell, it’s ad-supported. Like Vidoop, Schmap gets all its photo illustrations from Flickr, and the editors seem to search only for CC-licensed work; if the CC license permits commercial use, they go ahead and use it, and if it doesn’t, they ask for permission. I have no proof, but my guess is that they’ve identified users of CC-licenses as more open to reuse and sharing, regardless of whether or not their chosen licenses permit commercial use.
The agreement that they asked me to sign is the model of a good, creator-friendly agreement.
2. LICENSE GRANT
Subject to the terms and conditions herein, You hereby grant Schmap a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual license to include the Photos in the current and/or subsequent releases of Schmap’s destination/local guides.3. FAIR USE RIGHTS
Nothing in these Terms is intended to reduce, limit, or restrict any rights arising from fair use, first sale or other limitations on the exclusive rights of the copyright owner under copyright law or other applicable laws.
Non-exclusive! Explicitly encouraging fair use! Awesome! This is exactly the kind of thing I’d like to see from more scholarly and academic publishers. Hopefully, experiments like Schmap will demonstrate that it’s possible for some businesses to make money without controlling the copyrights in the content it distributes. A non-exclusive license will do.
Hi Molly! Jude told me about you. So maybe there’ll be a chance for us and other librarians in Singapore to meet up soon. That is, if you don’t mind mixing business with pleasure
I’ve got at least two copyright-related topics that I’d like to discuss: (1) Creative Commons, and (2) Deeplinks. Cheers!
Hey Molly,
I got schmapped too recently for one of the pictures I took of the SF gay pride parade. I thought it was pretty cool.
-Amy
Molly!
Stumbled upon your blog from a link at ©ollectanea via an article in the Chronicle. I, too, was schmapped for an unremarkable picture I took of a bunny in the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain. It made me think that they have some algorithm set up to find pictures and notify owners before the images actually pass before human eyes.
Hi Amanda! Happy almost May Day!
I’m pretty sure there are real people involved at some point, because I corresponded with one about the license agreement. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it was at least part algorithm; my picture, which was tagged Niagara-on-the-Lake because I took it during the week I spend in Niagara-on-the-Lake, is quite clearly a picture of Niagara Falls, if you bother to look.