I completely agree with Scoble on this one, although I can understand why people who make their living directly from their creations have a hard time letting go of the fear of giving away at least some of the rights to their content.

Cory Doctorow began releasing all of his literary work under creative commons licenses years ago, allowing people to freely download and distribute his work under some light provisos. I downloaded and read "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" on my palm pilot, freely and legally, and was hooked.

Because of that, I've read a huge amount of his writing, become a mammoth fan, and will likely purchase every book he publishes. I've also published everything I've written, shot, and produced under a similar license.

While that certainly hasn't brought me traditional commercial success, it has definitely accelerated serendipity countless times for me, and if you trace out the effects of those 'lucky' events, it's helped shape both my career and life.

Eric, i salute you for that attitude and all those that see that creative commons is the fundamental way to go for a future of mutual cooperation and support, the net and all it implies, the coming virtual reality total immersion (future of second life) etc are the innovations that will shape not only personal careers and lives but in my view the whole of society and our developing civilization. just as an interesting issue in this respect notice that the human genome has been released to the public under CC.
(btw I share the same experience with regard to Cory D.)
cheers

If she didn't want it out there in the first place she should have kept it private. If I post something to the internet its fair game - If I don't want it to be 'fai game' ...I don't post it.

Hmm - Although I think the reality is that people will use your content if you put it out there, I don't think it's necessarily "fair game". Lane's a fantastic professional photographer, and deserves credit and payment for her work, most importantly when it's used commercially.

Unfortunately, I think locking up her work in "private" will eventually cost her business, so it's a double edged sword.

For now, she seems to have switched to using low-res watermarked images on flickr. They're okay, but I'd really love to see some of the beautiful detail of her work, and that's not an option anymore.

I thought flickr provides a very good locking mechanism where you cannot copy or even print screen a picture if the owner doesn't want you to.

Hmm - Flickr displays images in a standard webpage, so I'd be very interested indeed if they can stop screenshots.

I adore Flickr, but they're definitely better at helping you share your photos than protect them. You can make photos "friends and family" only, even then, as Lane found out, people can still embed slideshows of your photosets in their website.

Going "friends and family" also means that you're less likely to have someone search for a topic, find your photo, and contact you about using your work, which is why Lane has gone the "small photos with watermark" route, I believe.

I actually came across (more than once) few of the pictures which I could not download or save for the life of me. I know I even tried print screens but when I paste, it pastes blank. The common denominator is the name of the file when I try to save protected images, it is always spaceball.gif (if I remember correctly). I thought it is pretty cool that it is even possible. I'll share with you the example if I come across such images again.

I had to consider similar consequences with my home recordings being uploaded online. Admittedly they're pretty amateurish, but they're still my own creations. I decided that if in the almost negligible chance that some plagiarizing musician took one of my songs and made it famous, I'd mostly take it as a compliment, since I'm not pursuing such avenues myself...more power to 'em.

In todays world content on the internet is public unless you MAKE it private. Things I don't want others to use I don't post to the internet.

Julie Bell has a site that displays her work that is copyproof. You can look but unless you but it you can't have, Not Yours.

I believe people should get recognition for their work. But if they don't want to share it they should not post it.

Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess.
All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner
through the fact that I give it away. To give is to enjoy possessively
the object which one gives.

Jean-Paul Sartre

on sharing:

I wish to be cremated. One tenth of my ashes shall be given to my agent, as written in our contract.

Groucho Marx

At The Open University we've been giving away our content under a Creative Commons license at the OpenLearn website for the last year for a number of reasons including our mission to open access to education and our research interests in Web 2.0/3.0/ collaborative learning and course creation etc. And we have very interesting discussions with the publishers whose materials we often used in our courses about whether we are mad or savvy to do this!