Creative Commons (Thing 9)

Strange timing, but I got an email through flickr yesterday regarding creative commons! Most of my public flickr images are Creative Commons, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike ... because, frankly, if someone wants to use my pictures I'm flattered - but I don't want them to make money off of them (especially since I'm not making any money off of them lol).
Here's the email: (btw, the subject of the email is "Why CC is bad")

Hello, I just want to send you a message on why CC photos are bad. People can use your photos without paying to use them, all they have to do is give you credit. They do not even have to notify you. for example, your new kids on the block photo: www.flickr.com/photos/mnicolem/2988302727/in/set-72157608512874713/ has been used here: www.walletpop.com/blog/2009/06/19/new-kids-on-the-block-blame-lousy-ticket-sales-on-recession/ now if it was not CC, you probably would have been paid about 100 bucks for this usage. Also, with you having your photos marked as CC, you are undermining the concert photography industry as sites like this would rather use a free photo rather than pay a professional for it. anyways, hope this is a eye opener.

(end of email)
Now - like I said before, I don't mind that my photo was used - I'm flattered! And if it weren't for CC, I probably would NOT have made $100 off of the pic, they would more likely have found someone else's photo to use ... then I would still not have the money and no one would have seen my photo, either ... so my wallet and head would be the same size, and at least with CC I get to have a big head :-) I actually enjoy going to flickr's stats page and seeing all of the places where my photos are being used - in my opinion, my photography skills can be legitimized by the fact that someone felt my picture was good enough to use, even if they didn't pay me for it. Now if I were a professional photographer and my livelyhood depended on getting paid for my photos, that would be a different story! I would obviously reserve all rights in that case. And I do reserve all rights on a select few of my photos, just in case I decide to try to sell them at some point.

On another note, I do sometimes use material from the web when teaching. People with autism often have difficulty generalizing - so a generic picture of a restaurant has much less meaning to them than a photograph of the particular McDonalds that we are going to be visiting. I've gotten kicked out of a Publix before for taking photos of items on the shelves (I have since learned that if I call ahead and explain what I will be using the photos for, they are happy to oblige) so I have to find photos of specific brands of items to create picture shopping lists when we go on CBI trips. And I find lots of pictures of environmental print to use during reading lessons.

One thing that I have run into regarding fair use/copyright involves Boardmaker pictures and files. Boardmaker is a software program used by almost every special education teacher in the world - and lots of teaching materials that I (and others) create use Boardmaker pictures. I have seen some teachers save the boardmaker files as a PDF then upload them to the web but I am hesitant to do that, because the images are copyrighted. If I upload it as a boardmaker file, then at least anyone who downloads it also has to own the software to open the file. For now, I stick to uploading my boardmaker files to Adapted Learning the online sharing site that Mayer Johnson (the company who makes Boardmaker) has created.