We are thrilled to relay Wired.com’s announcement that from now on all Wired.com staff-produced photos will be released under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial license (CC BY-NC)! Wired.com’s Editor in Chief Evan Hansen says,
“Creative Commons turns ten years old next year, and the simple idea of releasing content with “some rights reserved” has revolutionized online sharing and fueled a thriving remix culture. At Wired.com, we’ve benefited from CC-licensed photos for years — thank you sharers! Now we’re going to start sharing ourselves.”
We want to return the thanks to Wired.com for recognizing the power of open! Wired.com is a leader in covering the world of technology and a pioneer in commercial online publishing. We hope that others will recognize the value of both borrowing from, and contributing to, the richness of our shared commons.
To immediately sweeten the pot, Wired.com is celebrating their new licensing policy by releasing a CC-licensed gallery of 50 iconic photos from past stories including portraits of Steve Jobs, Woz, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer, Trent Reznor, JJ Abrams, and others. Check out Wired’s Flickr stream for high resolution formats of the photos.
Trent Reznor / Jon Snyder/Wired.com / CC BY-NC
We believe that there are incredible opportunities for publishers and news organizations in open licensing. With this commitment, Wired joins other prestigious news and content organizations who are sharing interesting and important resources with the world under CC, incluing Al Jazeera, Propublica, and GOOD. Thanks Wired.com!
CC license use in journalism and other domains, in addition to numerous other activities, are made possible thanks to donations from people like you. We are a nonprofit organization; please consider contributing to our annual campaign going on now! Thank you.
Given that Wired has thousands and thousands of photos online, I would hardly call its decision to CC-license 50 of them anything like an endorsement. From my perspective, it looks like Wired got some advertising on the CC website very cheaply indeed!
Maybe the “50 images” distracted from the more important message. I thought this was great. Wired.com is a recognisable brandname. Their very public statement on CC seems very clear to me: “Beginning today, we’re releasing all Wired.com staff-produced photos under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC) license and making them available in high-res format on a newly launched public Flickr stream.” They have made a long-term commitment rather than a one-off publicity stunt. I saw the selected 50 images as a focal point, to make their announcement more newsworthy. It’s all good.
NC? Please stop promotion this crude license. http://freedomdefined.org/
Stephen,
given that all existing photos online are most likely made by photographers under normal licencing modells it would be extremly costly to make the available as cc material. That is just looking at pure cost and does not involve the amount of work necessary to go through contracts, licence agreements and so on. I have no problem with them clearly now making the cut, quite frankly anything else would be stupid.
but pushing for ALL new staff produced photos to be ccbync is not a publicity stunt but a clear message and a signal.