Non-Commercial

Last night while I was taking pictures, specifically pictures of people's apartments late at night (Usually second or third floor apartments from the street, for the cool light streaming out of window effects, you sickos.), I got to thinking about release forms and rights of property owners and models.

While looking over some of the sample release forms over at Digital PhotoCorner, I noticed that commercial use of property DOES require a release. Which, I suppose, is good as I would not like a random picture of my house being used in a UPS ad without compensation. But then, I'm not selling my pictures, so that's no problem.

The twist comes in when you consider that I AM releasing all of my images under a Creative Commons license. The twist is, when you read the actual lawyer-speak, that I am essentially warranting that all my images released under the license are appropriate for the license I am releasing them under.

As of that moment, I was using the simple attribution license, which allows commercial use of my images. So, if I take a picture of some random house, then some company reading my photoblog can use my picture of the random house and use it for their national print campaign. If the homeowner objects, the company can simply pass along the liability to me, upon which I will be screwed because I did not obtain the proper property release form.

The solution, which I am not happy about because I want the widest possible distribution of my work, is to switch to the non-commercial license. This way, if somebody makes commercial use of my images, I'm off the hook as they clearly violated the terms of the license.

Just something to think about with your photoblog.
Oh, and if you do want to use any of my images for commercial work, leave me a comment and we can discuss terms.